Invoke: Archive
by Cici.Nota
Summary: In a reasonable world, answering a distress call would mean either the chance to help people, or the opportunity loot a ship full of the dead. This is not a reasonable world. (background slash/het/poly, FYI)
1. Prologue

Awareness came slowly, first in the form of something pressed firmly against his cheek. He tried to reach for it, but the same something was pushing against his hands and arms as well. He felt a solid, uniform pressure down his torso and thighs, and it was a full dizzying minute before his scrambled brain integrated the information into a realization that he was lying face down on a hard surface.

Scent came next, dust and old oil and the specific type of musty odor that came with a general air of neglect. He frowned, because he couldn't see anything that looked neglected, and it occurred to him that he couldn't see anything at all. One of his hands was near his face, he thought, but moving it closer was a task of herculean proportion. His limbs felt so very heavy.

He found his eyes, shaky fingers questing over them. They were closed, which at least explained why he couldn't see. He knew how to open them, but his eyelids were as heavy as everything else. He didn't know how long he might have drifted before jolting to awareness again, startled by the feather-light touch of his own hand against the bridge of his nose.

 _No_ , he thought, and it was surprisingly clear. He opened his eyes, seeing the blurry outline of his fingers against a shadowy backdrop. He blinked, the sandpapery feeling in his eyes fading, and began the task of sitting upright. His head pounded in time with his heartbeat, and he swallowed hard against a surge of nausea, squeezing his eyes closed again. The dark behind his eyelids helped, and when the vertigo faded, he risked opening them slowly.

He was on the bridge of a ship, unfamiliar in layout, at the foot of a railing bisecting the space in half. The lights that had been dim when he'd first woken now bright. _Motion sensors_? he thought distantly, and tried to stand. He had to clutch the rail to stay upright at first, and the vertigo was worse than it had been before. He clenched his jaw and tried to breathe evenly.

Something about the bridge seemed cramped, although the ceiling was too far above his head for him to reach and there was more than enough space for multiple people to move between the workstations. He leaned on the railing, carefully looking around. What he was beginning to think of as the front of the bridge was divided into a block of screens. A few of them were cracked and dark, and a few more had static. The rest showed still video of hallways and rooms, none of them familiar either. He looked curiously at one particular screen that showed an array of silver pods with blinking lights cascading over one end, but nothing else happened and he lost interest.

He reached for his pocket and then broke off the gesture, not sure what it was that he'd wanted. He knew there was something in his pocket, but as much as he'd reached for it automatically, he also knew that right now was not the time. He shook his head at the certainty of the thought and then regretted it as the room tilted around him. It took what felt like several minutes of clinging to the railing for his vision to clear, and he was breathing hard by the time everything settled. The pain had gone from a steady pulse to a dull and constant roar, and he rubbed at his temples, but it didn't help. He turned his attention outwards again, to his surroundings, on the off chance that there was someone hanging around who could tell him what was going on.

No one else was on the bridge, conscious or otherwise, unless they were stuffed behind the bulkheads, and he really didn't want to start tearing out the walls. Not only was there no one present, there was nothing to suggest how he'd gotten there, and he froze as he failed to remember where, exactly, he was.

"I was," he said, voice rough in his throat, and then stopped. He had no idea why he was on the bridge, or even on the ship. He cast his thoughts backward, trying to pin down the last thing he did remember, and came up against a misty gray blank. The pain in his head intensified as he tried to push past the slippery barrier, and as hard as he tried, he couldn't bring up any memories at all. "I am," he said, and then with increasing desperation, "My name is," and none of it brought even a flicker of recognition.

The pain spiked, driving him back down to his knees, stomach churning. He tasted bile at the back of his throat and pushed it back where it belonged. He ended up sitting with his knees pulled up to his chest, back firmly against the rail for support, trying to breathe. It was several long moments before he could scrub at the dampness on his face with a sleeve, and then he had the vague thought that he should be wearing some sort of coat or jacket, but it was gone before he could bring it to any sort of proper recognition. Pressing after it threatened to bring a resurgence of the pain, and he let it go.

"I don't know my name," he said, the words tasting odd. It struck him that he couldn't even identify the language he was speaking, and that suddenly struck him as hilarious. He laughed until his stomach hurt for an entirely different reason, and then just as suddenly the laughter turned to tears. He tried to choke down the unexpected sobs, but he couldn't stop crying any more than he'd been able to stop laughing, and it was terrifying enough that he managed to wrestle himself into submission. "I don't know who I am," he said, but this time it was a problem to be solved.


	2. The Broken Door

"I don't think there's anyone down here." Doc peered around yet another corner. There was virtually nothing to differentiate it from every other corridor they had explored; despite the size of the vessel, its lower levels were full of cramped hallways and small rooms. Gai had compared it to a rabbit warren, and then he'd had to explain what a rabbit was.

"Someone must be in here somewhere," Gai said.

"I don't think they're _here_ ," Doc retorted, and sneezed. The hallways were dusty, which just felt wrong. The CO2 scrubbers were still circulating, as evidenced by their ability to continue breathing, even if the air felt stale. "We could just go back."

"We have to keep looking until we're sure," Gai said, and every line of his body radiated heroic determination. Doc suppressed a sigh. Gai might have been a hyperactive overenthusiastic lunatic when it came to the objects of his particular obsession, which occasionally spilled over onto his teammates, but he was also bound and determined to _do the right thing, Doc, come on, that's what heroes do_.

"I don't care what the Galleon's sensors picked up, there is nothing here." Doc kicked at a door, which responded by jolting out of its groove and sliding just enough to let a whoosh of yet more stale air rush out. He pushed at it again, to see if he could open it enough to get into the room, but it was stuck. "And it's creepy."

"It's not creepy," Gai said, and then the partially open door settled with a loud crack and he flinched. "It's a little creepy."

"Tell me again why we're down here." Doc shrugged out of his pack and set it on the floor. He leaned through the narrow gap between broken door and standing frame and shone a flashlight into the room, silently thanking his foresight for telling him to bring one to begin with. He couldn't see anything other than the ubiquitous warren of storage crates and boxes, most of them sealed off.

"Because Marvelous thought it was a good idea to split up," Gai said.

"No, I mean, why are we down in the cargo hold?" Doc gave up looking, and started to turn towards Gai to properly express his frustration. Just as he did, he thought he saw something move through the edge of the flashlight's beam. "Hey!" he called.

The door was in the way, and the movement had been at the corner of the room least visible without actually going inside. Doc wedged himself as far in as he could, pointing the flashlight toward where he thought he'd seen something move, but now there was nothing. One of the containers looked like it had collapsed, but he couldn't see it from where he was.

"Did you see that?" he asked Gai, who was now hovering over his shoulder, knowing perfectly well that Gai wasn't in a position to see anything.

"Can you get the door open?" Gai asked instead of answering.

Doc wiggled back out into the hallway, eying the door frame. "I'm not sure." He called into the room again, but there was no answer. "If someone's in there, they're not answering."

"Stand back." Gai pulled out his GokaiCellular with his usual amount of drama. "I've got this."

"Stop that," Doc said. "You know we can't use those in here."

"I still don't see why not," Gai muttered, putting it away. "I can't believe I'm regretting not having a crowbar."

Doc glanced up and down the corridor. It was in a sad state of disrepair, which to his trained eye – and probably to anyone with a gram of common sense – indicated that the ship had been floating derelict for long enough for anyone still alive to be dead of old age. Of course, that didn't quite explain the distress signal.

 _Several Hours Earlier:  
_ Gai loved the crow's nest. He loved it even more when they were traveling through space than he had while the ship was more or less anchored on Earth; when on Earth, it was just a really neat high place from which he could see the surrounding countryside, but out in space it was amazing. The stars looked close enough to reach out and touch, at least as long as the Galleon was coasting at sub-light speeds.

Neither the deck nor the crow's nest were safe at faster than light speeds, but Gai had gone topside as soon as he'd felt the ship slow. Marvelous had wanted to stop somewhere for some reason, which might or might not have had something to do with the recent repairs they'd conducted; the near-destruction of the Galleon on the Zangyack homeworld and the subsequent borrowing of a past version of the Galleon before putting it back into the timeline where it belonged gave Gai a headache if he thought about it too much. He tried not to.

Repairing the Galleon for the second time had taken months, and had been punctuated by arguments and hurled accusations of blame, which brought Gai to the second reason he loved the crow's nest. No one else liked it quite as much as he did, and he wasn't likely to run into any of his crewmates. Once in a while, someone would wander up for a bout of melodramatic angsting, but for the most part Gai had it to himself.

Even knowing that the Zangyack homeworld wasn't likely to respawn any part of its Empire again had done nothing to rekindle the sense of camaraderie in the crew that Gai had found so admirable while the Gokaigers had spent their year and a half on Earth. Gai sometimes wondered if it was because, deep down, no one wanted to admit that singlehandedly throwing an entire society back into the dark ages before effective space travel might amount to genocide. He tried not think about that, either.

Ahim's efforts at playing peacemaker had run dry, just before this particular stop, and she'd locked herself in her quarters for the first time in Gai's memory. Gai didn't even know what the latest argument had been about; he'd just bolted from the stifling confines of the ship as soon as he could. The tiny planetoid beneath them reflected its light upwards, a shimmering purple atmosphere. Gai wondered if that meant its inhabitants didn't breathe oxygen, and if that were the case, whether the Gokaiger armor would provide air for them to breathe.

"Yo, Gai." An irritated rap on the bottom of the crow's nest accompanied the sound of Joe's voice, although maybe it was the voice that sounded irritated and not the knocking. Gai pulled open the trap door to see Joe on the ladder. "Meeting. Now."

"I'm coming," Gai said, and waited for Joe to start descending so he could climb down as well.

"Would you carry your GokaiCellular with you?" Joe said instead, with a level of annoyance unwarranted by the situation. "You need to be available. Just in case."

All the sense of calm Gai had gotten by looking at the stars evaporated. He struggled to hang on to as much of it as he could, and not snap back at Joe that he was extremely available just in case, because here he was getting the message that Marvelous wanted to talk to them all about something ridiculous. "Sure," he said, showing restraint.

Joe's eyes narrowed, and he shut his mouth with a snap before agitatedly moving down the ladder. Gai counted a full ten seconds before following, taking care to properly secure the trap door. No one else ever properly secured the trap door, leaving it to bang around. Joe was gone by the time Gai got to the empty deck; the so-called meeting was to be in the main room of the Galleon's habitable area, then. Gai did not take his time going inside, but he didn't precisely hurry, either. He was the last one to descend the stairs, and the rest of the crew was clustered around the main display screen when he arrived.

The display screen wasn't something that had a great deal of use for anyone other than Don; as far as Gai was concerned, it was largely pretty scenery that once in a while had useful information on it. At the moment, it was showing an unreadable map with a pulsing red dot way off to the left of the screen and the green mark he'd come to learn represented the Galleon in the bottom right corner. "What's going on?" he asked.

"Distress signal," Joe said, arms crossed over his chest. Marvelous shot him a hard look and he closed his mouth.

"We're going to answer it, right?" Gai said. They hadn't had a proper rescue mission since leaving Earth; there had been very few detours on the way to the Zangyack homeworld, and getting the Galleon nearly destroyed for the second time in as many major conflicts hadn't left them with much space to help anyone except themselves.

"Don can't tell how long it's been broadcasting," Joe said, nodding at the individual in question, who was fiddling with the wires under the console. Their captain sighed, and gestured with ill grace for him to continue. "It's in a pretty remote area."

"We're in a pretty remote area already," Luka said.

"It's in the Xuzuan Mire," Joe said.

"That's a bunch of superstitious nonsense," Marvelous snapped, apparently starting to lose his patience.

"What's the Xuzuan Mire?" Gai asked, his mouth moving before his brain could tell it to shut up and not get in the middle of what looked like a brand new argument between the captain and the first mate.

"It's a fairy tale," Marvelous said.

"It's the area around the Xuzuan Nebula," Joe said, tone repressive. "The stories surrounding it might be fairy tales, but it's a perfectly well defined region of space."

Marvelous threw up his hands. "Fine. You tell him your ghost stories. When you finish talking about boogeymen, I'll be in the galley."

Maybe a boost in blood sugar would make Marvelous less cranky, Gai hoped. He wasn't particularly optimistic.

"Wait, I heard stories about this," Luka said. "Wasn't that area supposed to be, uh, haunted?" She held up her hands, making little air quotes around the last word.

"The Zangyack had outposts there," Joe said. "Weird things happened there."

"So it was haunted," Gai said. "Like the Bermuda Triangle."

"The what? No. Stop." Joe pinched the bridge of his nose. " _Don't_ tell me. The Mire was supposed to be a punishment detail, for Action Commanders who screwed up, or Special Forces who couldn't hack it."

"That's it?" Gai said, when nothing else appeared to be forthcoming. "Weird things? What weird things?"

"The way I heard it," Luka said, "ships vanishing, never to be heard from again. Huge monsters coming out of nowhere and then vanishing again. Ion storms appearing where they shouldn't have been. Malfunctions in systems that should have been working perfectly. Ships would go in, and then have mysterious engine failures."

"I still think it's the Bermuda Triangle of space," Gai muttered.

"Does the Bermuda Triangle have kraken?" Luka retorted. She mangled the pronunciation of _Bermuda Triangle_ , but Gai didn't bother correcting her.

"Not exactly," he said, and then, "you mean there are giant squid in space?"

"What?" Luka stared at him as if he'd said something remarkably stupid. "Who said anything about a giant squid?"

"You said kraken," Gai protested. "That's a giant squid."

"No, it isn't." Luka rolled her eyes, and Gai bit down on the urge to defend his intelligence.

"There's no such thing as a kraken," Joe said wearily. "Nobody goes into the Mire except for the Zangyack."

"That's because there's nothing useful in the nebula," Luka said. "Nobody lives in there. Nothing valuable to get out of it." She looked at the screen. "Pretty, though."

"So are we going after the distress call?" Gai asked.

Joe looked pointedly at Don and Ahim, who'd been talking quietly. Neither of them noticed, until Joe cleared his throat loudly.

"It's not a standard Zangyack distress signal," Don said. "So I know exactly where it's coming from, but I can't tell what kind it is or how long it's been broadcasting."

"Marvelous!" Joe called, striding toward the galley.

"Yes, yes, we're going," Marvelous said, emerging with a half-eaten apple. "Either we get to rescue someone, or there'll be a bunch of corpses and something to steal."

"Marvelous," Gai said, unable to help himself.

"What?" Marvelous looked utterly unconcerned. "It's a win/win."

"Not for the dead people!" Gai spluttered.

"If they're alive, we'll help them." Marvelous shrugged. "I don't know why you're so worked up."

Gai took a deep breath and reminded himself that Marvelous wasn't trying to act like an callous sociopath on purpose. "But we'll try to help," he said, carefully.

"Of course," Marvelous said, as though Gai were asking a ridiculous question.

"Okay, then."

"Good catch, Navi," Marvelous said, fixing his eyes on their mechanical parrot. It was perched on the console by the screen, eyes dark. "Navi?"

"He's in hibernation mode," Don said. "I need him to filter the distress signal out from the background radiation if we want a clear signal."

"Whatever." Marvelous stalked toward the stairs, clearly intending on heading above the deck despite having just ordered the Galleon to jump to faster-than-light speed. "Let me know when we get there."


	3. The Silent Engine

"Look at the size of those," Luka breathed, staring at the ship's massive engine. Properly speaking, it wasn't the entirety of the engines, which took up eight decks in vertical space alone, just as much of one of the manifolds as could be seen in the three story space around them.

"It's an old model," Ahim said, delicately maneuvering around a fallen strut. There had been walkways extending up to nearly the ceiling of the cavernous chamber once upon a time, but they were broken and hung from the bulkheads at odd angles where they hadn't fallen entirely. The engines themselves were quiescent; when running even at partial throttle, the noise would have been deafening and the heat unbearable. "Not very efficient."

"Oh?" Luka ducked under part of another fallen walkway, trailing a hand down the side of the manifold. A creak sounded ahead of her, followed by the sound of part of the walkway hitting the ground somewhere. A puff of dust showed her exactly where the piece had fallen, and Luka glanced upwards. She had enough to worry about without watching for parts of the freighter actually falling onto their heads.

"Look how big it is," Ahim said. She'd looked up warily as well, after she'd followed Luka's gaze enough to see what the noise was, and then seemed to dismiss the possibility of falling debris from above. "Our engines don't take up nearly this much space." She paused. "Of course, the Galleon is constructed particularly well."

"Our entire ship doesn't take up nearly this much space," Luka muttered, which wasn't strictly true.

"The crew wouldn't have been able to enter without protective suits, either," Ahim continued.

"Oh, is that what those were for?" There was a hole big enough in the manifold for a person to fall into, if she weren't careful. Luka skirted around it. She was beginning to want to dismiss this entire expedition as an exercise in futility.

"Unless you can withstand excessive heat." Ahim smiled. "Most humanoids can't. The Gormin can't, for example."

"How do you know?" Luka asked. Futile or not, she and Ahim were stuck in the engineering section at least until Marvelous swung back around with the Galleon to pick them up. If all had gone according to plan, the Galleon was moored outside the bridge. Luka supposed that they could just go there, if she could convince Ahim not to stick to the full-day reconnaissance plan. She discarded the idea with an internal sigh; at the very least, this was a less stressful atmosphere than the Galleon had been lately.

"I had a very broad education," Ahim said, and Luka guiltily realized she'd missed whatever else Ahim had said. "The majority of it dealt with law, negotiation, and social theory, but I also had a thorough grounding in history and logistics. And the history of logistics. Knowing why something is a good or bad idea is important, if one is to be making decisions."

"I guess," Luka said. "You see anyone?"

"Nothing," Ahim said. "No one. Just broken pieces of ship." She sounded almost sad, although whether that had more to do with the waste of life or the waste of inanimate resources was anyone's guess.

"Anything useful?"

"It's all obsolete," Ahim said. "Most of it. I suppose there might some raw material around that we could use, but none of it is particularly high value."

"Trace metals in the electronics or the wiring?" Luka poked at a crumbling bulkhead, but the wiring underneath that particular section had rusted. She sighed. "Maybe something in the reactor?"

"I'm surprised the reactor is still functioning," Ahim said. "Usually, without proper maintenance, they tend to explode."

"This crate is going to explode?" Luka's heart stuttered once, fell into her stomach, and then picked up with a rapid patter. She pulled the straps on her backpack tighter, on the off chance they were going to have to make a run for it.

"It hasn't yet," Ahim said, which was not reassuring in the way she'd probably meant it.

"And you didn't think this was worth mentioning before?" Luka demanded, not giving in to her impulse to grab the other woman by the shoulders and shake her. She now had even less desire to spend the night in the middle of the freighter full of junk that could possibly explode without warning than she'd had before Marvelous had decided that a full 24 hour reconnaissance jaunt was necessary. Though if Luka were going to be fair, Joe had suggested and Marvelous had pounced on said suggestion.

"I did mention the potentially delicate atmosphere," Ahim said.

"I didn't think that's what you meant!" Luka took her Mobilate out of her pocket and glared at it. "Is that why you and Doc said we shouldn't use these things to transform?"

"Well, partly." Ahim smiled again, which was apparently supposed to be reassuring. It wasn't. "Don't worry, Luka. If it's lasted this long, the chances of the reactor becoming unstable at this stage is – well, it's higher than it would have been earlier, but it's really lasted a remarkably long time. Oh, unless this is a class –"

Luka stopped listening to Ahim's dissertation on engine classes and kicked the wall. Gently. Really, there was no good reason for them to be out here in the first place.

 _Several Hours Earlier:  
_ "Where's Gai?" Marvelous demanded, looking impatient and cranky and above all mildly disheveled, the last of which was of the most cause for concern. Ahim saw Luka shrug out of the corner of her eye, which was only going to make their captain more irritable. Not that much made anyone on the Galleon anything less than irritable, lately; their teamwork had been off, since Bacchus Gill and the near-destruction of the ship. The ship itself was in excellent shape, or very nearly, according to Doc, who was the only one who knew how any of it worked.

"I believe he's in the crow's nest," Ahim said, before someone else could say something more inflammatory. "Would you like me to go get him?"

Marvelous glanced at the GokaiCellular, left carelessly on the coffee table. "Would you," he said, clearly aiming for polite.

"I'll do it," Joe said, and vanished up the stairs before anyone had a chance to object. He was handling the mood aboard the Galleon worse than the rest of them; for all of Joe's outward strength, much of his emotional stability rested on his relationship with the crew in general and Marvelous in particular. When the two of them were out of synch with each other, Joe bore the brunt of the adverse effects; Marvelous just got reckless.

"Show me what we're looking at," Marvelous said after a very few minutes of waiting.

"I need to borrow Navi," Doc said absently, and the room devolved into an uncomfortable silence broken only by the clicking of the console and an occasional soft buzzing noise. Ahim moved closer to Doc, peering over his shoulder.

"You're blocking the light," Doc said, more harshly than she felt warranted.

Ahim shoved down the retort that wanted to form and made herself smile instead. She'd hoped, after they'd returned the past version of the Galleon to its proper time and repaired the present version of it, that her crewmates would start to mellow out. It hadn't happened so far, but she was damned if she was going to contribute to it. "I'm sorry," she said, and stepped back. "May I ask what you're doing?"

"I'm sorry, Ahim," Doc said, after a few beats. "I didn't mean to snap." He pointed at the console. "See here?" He started explaining how he was boosting the receiver to pick up what was apparently a signal that was neither coming through clearly nor particularly strong at this range. Ahim only followed about three quarters of it, but she could see Doc relax as he explained the process.

"What about Navi?" she asked at one point. Joe had come down the stairs, face like a storm cloud despite his temporary escape, and Gai wouldn't be much farther behind him.

"Ah, now that's the really interesting part," Doc said, happily oblivious to everything happening behind him. Navi was perched on the edge of the console by this point, several panels open and wires running into the panel. Ahim had no idea where Doc had gotten the extra harness, or even that Navi could be opened in that particular manner.

Ahim followed a little more of the subsequent explanation, but she knew enough about the underlying theory to ask the right questions, with her voice pitched low enough for Doc to unconsciously mirror it as the rest of the crew argued about whether or not to answer the distress signal Doc was currently boosting and whether or not the region of space in which it was located was, in fact, haunted or just unlucky.

At one point, Marvelous stalked toward the galley, apparently fed up with the question of space ghosts. Ahim felt that rather unfair, given the odd things they'd all seen during their tenure on the Galleon.

"Did they just say giant squid?" Doc asked, and Ahim shrugged. She'd stopped listening.

"Is there a video component?" she asked, and Doc shook his head.

"Just the same repeating pattern," he said.

"How do you know it's a distress signal?" she asked.

"Navi identified it," Doc said. "He has access to the ship's database, but I could do a search to confirm."

Ahim was about to ask him to do that when the sound of Joe pointedly clearing his throat caught her attention. She and Doc both looked up to find the rest of the crew sans Marvelous looking at them expectantly. "Yes?" she said.

"The distress call," Joe said impatiently. "Who's it from?"

"It's not a standard Zangyack distress call," Doc said, and then hurriedly continued before Joe could tell him that hadn't been the question. "Or one I'm familiar with. I mean, I know _where_ it's coming from. But I don't know who sent it, or how long it's been broadcasting."

"Huh." Joe spun on his heel. "Marvelous!" he shouted.

"We're going, we're going," Marvelous said from the door of the galley before Joe could get more than two steps away.

 _So that's where he went_ , Ahim thought.

"Either way we win," Marvelous continued, taking another bite of his apple. "Someone who needs help gets it, from a very dashing source, or the crew is dead and we get their possessions."

"Marvelous!" Gai said with a distinct note of reproach.

"What?" For once, the implied criticism rolled right off Marvelous' metaphorical back. "Win/win."

"Not if they're all dead!" Gai said, his voice rising.

"If they're already dead, there's nothing we can do," Marvelous said. "If they're alive, we help. I don't know what else you want."

Ahim could see Gai grinding his teeth from halfway across the room, but he made an admirable attempt to not react. "But we're going to help," he said.

"Obviously," Marvelous retorted, as if there were no other possible answer.

"Well, okay." Gai actually looked calmer than he had in weeks.

Ahim rubbed at her ear; it had been aching a little, on and off, but now it felt as though it had been stuffy and had cleared without her noticing. As a result, she missed whatever Marvelous said that had Doc explaining what he was doing with Navi, in much less detail.

"Whatever," Marvelous said, dismissing the explanation the way he usually did. Doc grinned at her a little, instead of looking hurt and ignored the way he had been for the past several weeks, and shrugged as Marvelous left the common area.

"We should all take the chance to get some sleep," Doc said softly. "It's at least a ten or twelve hour trip."

Ahim smiled back, although honestly, all of them could use the rest. Nobody had been sleeping well, it seemed. She laid a hand on Doc's shoulder momentarily as he went back to whatever it was he was doing and went to the galley to make a relaxing tea for everyone.

Gai had vanished as well, but Joe and Doc actually accepted the tea as both the peace offering and relaxation aid that it was, though Ahim wasn't sure Doc was actually going to drink it before it got cold. Luka stole hers off the tray, but with a brush of her hand against Ahim's arm that let her know that Luka was trying to be cute and not obnoxious. Ahim settled into a chair, staring out at the stars rushing past with her own cup.


	4. The Cascading Light

No part of the freighter was Zangyack. Joe knew those designs and specs by heart, no matter how much he might have wanted to forget, and the ship through which he was currently moving had a different design. It wasn't just the outer hull; anyone could make any sort of shape for whatever reason, and if the Empire chose a specific external design based on its capacity for intimidation, that didn't mean that the guts of the ships in different classes didn't have the same basic logic.

The subtle differences in design contributed to a general sense of unease, underscored by the flickering lighting. Joe knew exactly how a Zangyack ship would have been wired, and at least the basics for repairing common minor issues, but the freighter's unfamiliarity meant that he couldn't predict what each little malfunction might have meant.

Joe was surprised any of the freighter's systems were working at all; Ahim and Luka were down by the engines, with instructions to assess the state of the central reactor. Joe felt it would have been better to let Doc examine the engines, given his expertise, but no one listened to Joe when he made personnel recommendations. The lights in the corridor ahead of him went dark entirely, and Joe cursed under his breath. "I can't believe I'm regretting not bringing a flashlight," he muttered, although there was probably no one to hear him.

The area Joe was currently trying to reconnoiter consisted of living quarters and work spaces that became necessary on a vessel this size; most of its space was taken up by a hold consisting of hard vacuum storage, but the size of the engines and the ship itself meant it needed support staff to supplement the automatic diagnostics and maintenance. Though there was far less habitable space on the ship than there appeared to be from the outside, Joe had his doubts about the six of them trying to do a manual sweep to begin with.

The living spaces were a bust, so far, sadly abandoned with personal effects just left to molder. Joe peered down the darkened corridor ahead of him and contemplated the benefits of just leaving that particular section alone. He thumped on the wall, and the lights flickered back on at full strength for a few minutes before settling into a sort of half-lit glow. Joe rolled his eyes and kept walking.

If he remembered the schematics correctly – and he knew that he did, because he wasn't about to get lost in a vessel this size – he was approaching the medical complex. The majority of the problems this type of ship would see, if Joe remembered correctly, had to do with accidental exposure to either vacuum or any one of the various types of radiation that came more or less standard in space in general and on this ship in particular. Joe was suddenly glad for the Galleon's shielding technology, which kept the environment aboard well within the health limits for humanoids.

The medical complex was half-lit as well, with a few sections completely dark when he managed to pry the door open. Of course it was the one door that didn't open automatically when he approached it. Joe sighed and pounded the walls again, but the lights didn't respond to percussive maintenance this time. "Stupid freighter," he muttered at it.

There was no one immediately visible, although there were several storage cabinets that looked undisturbed. Joe opened a few doors, out of curiosity, and noted a number of supplies that might come in handy on the Galleon. He picked a few samples off the shelf and stuffed them into his pack, and made a mental note to come back to them later, if they didn't find anyone alive. Part of the mission, after all, was to determine if there was anything useful to take home in case the response to the distress signal had come too late.

The door to the corridor, his most significant source of light, slid shut as the overhead lights flickered out, plunging the room into total darkness. He flinched and suppressed a startled curse, Gokai Gun automatically in hand. He was twelve steps from the door, which he thought he remembered being to his left. Moving silently, Joe inched toward it, keeping his weapon ready in his right hand and feeling in front of him with his left. He found a doorframe beneath his questing fingers after fifteen steps rather than twelve, accounting for the desk he'd had to go around and farther to the left than he'd thought, but it was there.

Of course the door did not slide open. Using his left hand only, Joe felt around the door itself to see if he could find some sort of catch on the inside, but there was nothing. A Zangyack ship would have had a panel to the side of the door frame in case of malfunction, and he was feeling for it before he could stop himself. Somewhat to his surprise, he felt one. No sooner had he touched it than the door slid open.

It was just as dark in the corridor as it had been inside the clinic, and Joe bit down on another sigh. He moved forward, carefully, left hand still outstretched and listening for any noise other than the sound of his own breathing and the vague hum of the ship's ventilation system.

As soon as he cleared the doorway, Joe heard two things; the door sliding closed and the unmistakable purr of machinery that hadn't been in the corridor. "Marvelous," he said, under his breath, "I blame you for this."

 _Several Hours Ago:  
_ The decline bench didn't fit properly in Joe's quarters, unless he wanted to perform acrobatics to get anywhere. Then again, it couldn't hurt, and would keep him on his metaphorical toes, and having the bench in his quarters meant less of a chance of running into anyone. _Marvelous_ , his traitorous mind tried to supply, and he squashed the thought.

No one had particularly spacious quarters, except the captain whose name Joe was currently pretending did not exist, but the space seemed even smaller with Joe's workout equipment stacked in it. He'd been moving the bits and pieces of it slowly over the past several days; if no one could be civil in the common area, he wasn't going to be in the common area.

Joe eyed the space critically; if he kept the door closed, there was just enough clear floor to do pushups in front of it. _At least this is going well_ , he thought. The repair process for the Galleon had been long and difficult, and everyone had been on edge. Being vulnerable on the Zangyack homeworld was stressful, no matter how thoroughly they'd broken its governmental structure. Joe had tried to be patient, reminding himself that everyone was on edge, and that things would be better once they left.

Nothing had gotten better when they'd left; their failure to find the second greatest treasure in the universe, allegedly on the Zangyack homeworld, had put a damper in Marvelous' enthusiasm for everything. Worse than that, the farther away the Galleon got, the more irritable it seemed that everyone became. The only people not fighting constantly were Ahim and Luka, and they only people they didn't argue with were each other. "Must be nice," Joe said to his empty room.

The door banged open, and Joe automatically brought his hands up in a defensive posture. It was Marvelous, glaring at him. "Where have you been?"

"Here," Joe said, keeping his response as short and civil as possible.

"Well, come out. Navi found something." Marvelous vanished before Joe could respond. Joe sighed and picked his way around his possessions, making sure to close the door tightly behind him. No need to invite anyone to come wandering in without his express permission.

The common area was empty when Joe got there, and he eyed the flat expanse of the floor for a few seconds. Pushups he could do in his room, but there was some footwork he couldn't practice without more space. It wasn't long, though, before Ahim came up one set of stairs and Luka came down the other. Marvelous was hard on Luka's heels; Joe wondered if she'd been up on the outer deck. The Galleon had been orbiting a minor colony, making the outer decks safe to be on.

"Where did Gai get off to?" Marvelous demanded. His vest was unfastened, and the shirt underneath it was buttoned haphazardly. Joe wondered vaguely what, exactly, Marvelous had been doing, and who he'd been doing it with, and decided he didn't want to know.

Belatedly, Joe heard the words _crow's nest_ and an offer from Ahim to collect their wayward Earthling teammate. He muttered something to the effect of finding Gai and took off before Ahim could actually leave. The atmosphere in the common area was stifling with all five of them in it, and it was driving him to distraction. It felt wrong.

The outer deck was like a breath of fresh air, or it would have been if they'd been in an atmosphere instead of above one. The pale lilac of the planetoid below them was still pretty, and Joe took a brief moment to appreciate it before climbing the mast. It seemed longer than usual, for some reason, and Joe was a quarter of the way up before he thought to try calling the GokaiCellular. Receiving no answer, Joe kept climbing.

The trapdoor was closed, and Joe banged on it. "Hey, Gai." The Earthling pulled the trapdoor open, looking down at him in surprise. "Meeting," Joe said, before Gai could speak. "Now."

"Okay," Gai said, and just crouched there.

Unreasonably annoyed that Gai was making no move to exit the crow's nest, Joe glared at him. "Your GokaiCellular," he said. "Would you keep it with you? So we can get in touch with you if something happens."

Gai, for his part, went from uncooperative to outright hostile in the space of two sentences. "Fine," he said, although Joe could tell that he wanted to say something else. Joe's eyes narrowed, and he bit down on his own response. Gai could sit up here forever, if he wanted; Joe wasn't going to take responsibility for his teammate being irresponsible. He descended the ladder far more quickly than he'd gone up, leaping down the last few meters to land lightly on the deck.

"Well?" Marvelous said, when Joe jogged down the stairs.

"I told him," Joe said.

"Is he coming?" There was an acid undertone in Marvelous' voice that Joe did not appreciate. He was saved by having to answer by the unmistakable sound of footsteps on the stairs. He pointed at it and went over to the screen where the others were standing in a loose cluster. Marvelous followed a second later, and Joe saw on the screen why Marvelous had assembled them all in the first place.

A red dot representing a distress signal was in one corner of the screen with the Galleon in the other. "How long?" Joe asked Marvelous, some of his ire draining away at the prospect of something concrete to do.

Marvelous shrugged. "Can't tell," he said, and it sounded less hostile. Joe felt his shoulders relax, just a little, and then he had to explain to Gai what was going on, which inexplicably seemed to piss Marvelous off again.

"It's in a remote area," Joe explained, at Gai's confused look.

"We're in a remote area," Luka said. "Depending on what you call remote."

"The signal is coming from the Xuzuan Mire," Joe said, finally managing to read the map and horrified at where Marvelous apparently wanted to take them. Concrete or not, there were places that ships just did not go without reinforcements, and the Mire was one of them.

"Superstitious nonsense," Marvelous snapped, because of course _he_ didn't care about what happened to other ships. If the Galleon could run on confidence alone, Marvelous could have powered it forever.

"The what, now?" Gai said. "Xuxuin?" He mangled the pronunciation.

"It's a fairy tale," Marvelous said repressively.

"It's the area around the Xuzuan Nebula," Joe explained, emphasizing the correct pronunciation. "You might dismiss Zangyack reports as superstition, but it's a perfectly well defined area of space."

"Fine." Marvelous threw up his hands. "Tell him your ghost stories. After you're done scaring your crewmate with ridiculous stories about made-up monsters, I'll be in the galley."

Luka perked up, an unexpected ally in defining the creepy aura around the Mire. The more she and Joe described what sorts of things tended to happen to Zangyack ships attempting to maintain their outposts in the area, the more skeptical Gai looked, until he misidentified a kraken as a giant squid and Joe had had enough.

"Kraken don't exist," he said. "The only people that go in there are the Zangyack, and they haven't found any sort of giant creature."

Luka looked as if she wanted to argue the hypothetical presence of giant monsters in a nebula that was clearly haunted, or bad luck, or alive and not wanting anyone inside it, or any other explanation for the extremely high rate of failure of Zangyack missions to the area without any solid proof of opposition. "There's nothing useful in there," she said instead. "No one lives in it. No reason for anyone to go in, other than the scenery."

It might have been an attempt at peacemaking. Joe let it go, but Gai chose that moment to focus on whether or not they were going to answer the distress signal and prompted a whole new spat about whether or not it was appropriate to scavenge the ship if no one was left alive. For some reason, he seemed to think that would be disrespectful, and that the sentiment should outweigh the Galleon's pressing need for tangible supplies.

Joe extricated himself from that particular conversation; someone would tell him when they got where they were going, and they'd solve whatever problems came up then.

The crow's nest, when Joe reached it, was already occupied. He lifted the trap door to see a familiar red coat, and immediately tried to back down.

"You might as well come up the rest of the way," Marvelous said, somewhere between annoyed and resigned. "I was just about to leave."

"You could stay," Joe offered, climbing through the trap door and letting it fall shut.

"Someone is going to say something, and I'm not in the mood for a fight." The sentiment didn't sound like the captain Joe knew, and he edged around the crow's nest until he wasn't standing directly behind Marvelous. Looking closer, Joe could see the exhaustion written clearly on Marvelous' face, and it softened the sharp response he'd been about to make.

"Or we could just not say anything," he offered, standing almost close enough to touch, but not quite.

To Joe's surprise, Marvelous leaned against him, just enough that Joe could feel his warmth. It felt like hesitation, which was so far outside Marvelous' usual repertoire that it nearly set Joe's teeth on edge. He lifted his arm, which got him the start of a hurt and surprised look, and pulled Marvelous roughly towards him. Marvelous smirked at that, gripping Joe around the waist not quite tightly enough to hurt. "If I'd known this is how you react to someone being polite," he said.

"Ha." The past weeks – months – had been rough on all of them, but finally being able to touch Marvelous without him snapping and moving away felt like a step in the right direction. "You're not polite," Joe said after a moment. "You take what you want."

"Yeah, well." Marvelous rested his forehead on Joe's shoulder and sighed, breath hot against Joe's skin. "You promised me silence," he said after a moment. Joe smiled, not that Marvelous could see it, and squeezed harder for just a moment. The view of the stars shivered, and Marvelous detached himself with an air of regret. "Time to go inside."

The air below decks seemed a little less stifling as the hatch closed and Joe felt the ship shift into faster than light speed. Marvelous paused at the top of the stairs, but Ahim was staring pensively into her cup of tea, and none of the other three were visible. Joe walked around him, heading for the next deck down and crew quarters, and after a moment Marvelous followed.

When Joe made as if to walk past Marvelous' door to sleep in his own bed, the way he had been, Marvelous stopped him. "You don't really want that, do you?" he asked.

It was Joe's turn to hesitate, and he could see Marvelous' expression start to close off. "I'd just like to sleep," he said, but it was enough to get him the start of a smile when he followed Marvelous into his quarters. The trip toward the cursed region of space was surprisingly restful; Joe slept without nightmares for the first time in weeks, and woke to tapping on his door that didn't immediately set his teeth on edge. He even enjoyed breakfast with the rest of the crew, although Marvelous didn't stir when Joe slipped out of bed to get dressed, and Joe elected not to wake him.

The distressed ship in question, when it came into view, was massive, a pre-Zangyack-era cargo freighter. Joe had to search his memory for the system in which it would have originated, and eventually gave up. Just because the freighter was ancient, though, didn't mean it hadn't been in use until recently. The Empire had contributed to a distinct scarcity of resources, and a ship like this one wouldn't have been thrown away lightly. Even so, there was something about it Joe didn't like. It wasn't near any of the larger asteroids or planetoids inside the nebula, nor was it near any of the Zangyack outposts, and it wasn't anywhere near any of the standard shipping lines the Zangyack had mapped out. Granted, given its probable nature as a non-Zangyack ship, it made perfect sense that it wouldn't use Zangyack routes, but then it wouldn't be in the nebula at all.

"It's a smuggler's ship," Joe said, just as Marvelous voiced the same sentiment from behind him. He hadn't heard the captain approach.

"Should be something interesting on board," Marvelous said, with his usual smirking grin. Joe couldn't exactly disagree.

"Does it still have power?" he asked. "Anyone on board answering?"

"Not so far," Doc said. "I mean, no one's answering, but it looks like the reactor's up and running."

The top half of the freighter was surrounded in the soft glow of interior light reflecting off the surrounding nebula; it wouldn't have been visible in open space, but the ambient gases magnified it just enough to illuminate the freighter.

"Is it stable?" Marvelous asked.

"It's hard to tell from here." Doc tapped at the console. "I can't get any of the ship's internal records, either, all I get is a ping back letting me know that something is online. And the distress call, but it's automated, and I still don't know how long it's been running."

"Any plague markers?" Marvelous asked, sharp now.

"Huh," Doc said. "That request went through. No, the atmosphere looks clean from here. Oh!" He stopped for a moment, tapping more rapidly at the keyboard. "I've got one log entry, something about the engines malfunctioning. That's it."

"So we're not going to be poisoned if we go over there," Marvelous said.

"Is anyone alive?" Gai asked.

"I'm not sure."

"If you can tell that the air is good, shouldn't you be able to find people?" Gai had clearly been absorbing way too many ridiculous stories, Joe thought.

"I'm relying on the ship's computer to give me a valid report on the internal atmosphere," Doc explained. "There's some information that universally gets shared, and some that you need permission for. Life status of the crew is in the second column."

Gai blinked and frowned, clearly prepared to argue that specific fact from the point of view of what he thought was morally appropriate.

"Any chance that the freighter's CPU is wrong?" Ahim asked.

"We can check the atmosphere manually before we go in," Doc said. "Or we could wear the Gokai armor, if the atmosphere turns out to be hostile."

"Doc," Ahim said, pointing to something that made absolutely no sense to Joe. "Look at the configurations here, and here. That could pose a problem."

Doc's face fell. "We can't use the Mobilates over there. The energy signal cross-interferes with the ship systems."

"What?" Marvelous demanded, which was the prompt for a long technical explanation from both Ahim and Doc. Joe wasn't sure of any of it, except that apparently using the Mobilates or the GokaiCellular for anything other than communication would disrupt the ship's systems. Normally, it would only cause minor glitches, but given the unknown status of the freighter, there was a very real possibility of a cascade failure.

"What would that do?" Gai asked, looking both horrified and fascinated.

"Maybe just leave the entire ship dead in the water, so to speak," Doc answered. "Maybe spark a critical failure in the reactor. It's hard to say."

"Fine. Nobody transform," Marvelous said. "We'll split up into teams and check things out."

"Let me send Navi to verify the atmosphere first," Doc said, and reactivated their helper.

Sending a dubiously helpful robot bird to do the initial sweep of select parts of the ship revealed a uniform atmosphere with nothing immediately dangerous evident, which laid to rest questions regarding a potential biochemical contaminant. There was also no one visible during Navi's preliminary sweep, which meant it was very unlikely they'd find survivors and that the primary mission was finding something useful to bring back during the 24-odd hours they planned to spend searching the freighter.

"Wonderful," Luka said. Joe couldn't tell if she was sarcastic or not.

"Gai, go with Luka," Marvelous said. "The two of you will check out the pressurized cargo holds. Doc and Ahim, engine compartment."

"I'm not going with Gai," Luka said, and Gai gave her a wounded puppy look.

"Fine, take Ahim," Marvelous snapped. "I'll take the command and operational decks; if there are any records of what happened to the crew of the freighter, that's where they'll be. Joe, living quarters and medical bay."

"Yes, sir," Joe said, only slightly sarcastic as Navi came sailing back inside Galleon and perched on the console. Marvelous shot him a hard look, though with less irritation than he might have shown the day before.

"Gokaigers, move out."


	5. The Array

Joe tried to both keep his back to where he at least knew a wall was, and feel around for some sort of light switch or manual release for the door, or anything that would give him more information. All he knew was that he'd gotten turned around somehow, and that he was definitely not in the corridor. He carefully modulated his breathing, listening for anything that would tell him give him information on his surroundings.

The deep purr of the machinery, whatever it was, continued steady and unabated. Joe couldn't hear anything else in the room, except for the noises he himself was making. He found the edge of the door with his left hand, carefully tugging on it. It didn't open. Joe moved carefully sideways, keeping one hand on the door, until he had better leverage in the pitch dark, and pushed. It still didn't work.

Back to the wall, left hand trailing along it and right hand aiming his gun at some indeterminate point in front of him, Joe moved carefully along the edge of the room. If he could find another door, he might be able to either get enough light to break down the first one or get out of the room a different way. His pack dragged at his shoulders, for all that it wasn't particularly heavy; it had been his idea in the first place to spend a solid 24 hours on board the freighter, but Joe was starting to regret the suggestion.

"I should just apologize," he muttered to the empty room, and at the sound of his voice, the lights came on. Joe bit down on a curse and dropped into a crouch; the lights were bright enough that his dark-adjusted eyes immediately started watering. He blinked, squinting until the glare faded into something manageable and he could tell where he was.

The room was a sterile white, tiled floor and three blank walls surrounding a row of silver pods. Blinking lights cascaded over the pod at the far end of the room, which was the only one closed; the rest were open. The one wall that wasn't empty had a series of screens, one of which displayed several graphs, and the rest of which were blank. Joe frowned. The door had cracked open when the lights had come on, and he went back to it. It obligingly slid open.

Joe stepped out into the half-lit clinic, looking to see where the door back to the corridor had gone. It was exactly where he'd left it, half-open, but he'd gotten disoriented to the tune of approximately ninety degrees, and it wasn't on the wall he'd thought he'd been facing.

"Huh." Joe turned to look at the room he'd stumbled into, out of curiosity. There was a label on the door, marking it as a temporary re-training facility, and Joe felt a wave of nausea as he realized exactly what the row of pods was for, or at least that there had been rumors and exaggerated stories about rooms just like this one.

Rumor had had it, when Joe had first been through basic training for the Zangyack Imperial Special Forces, that one of the systems most recently conquered had had a particularly brutal method of training assassins. The hopefuls, so the story went, were chosen, placed inside a series of connected pods, and pitted against each other in a simulated battle royale. From there, the potential assassin would leave the system; in order to not end a session too early, the system couldn't be disengaged from the outside. The stories had differed as to whether or not death inside the virtual reality environment meant death in real life, and sometimes it had been whispered that failing cadets were also placed in the pods, where they were cleanly and neatly executed with no resistance.

Some of the stories claimed that the Zangyack would adapt the technology to train its own soldiers once the system in question was conquered, but then the question of which system, exactly, had used a linked virtual reality system was never really answered. All of the tech the Zangyack Empire used to create mental simulations or to temporarily or permanently alter memories were individual only; as far as Joe knew, it wasn't possible to mechanically link two brains together, and the stories were just rumors. Over time, he'd forgotten them.

But if the array in the room behind him was real, if it was something more than just a rumor, it had the potential to be incredibly valuable. Joe shrugged out of his pack and left it wedged into the doorway. If the door decided to slide shut again, the pack would keep it open, hopefully without damaging the generally non-breakable contents in the process. Joe looked at the bright red of the pack for a moment, the only splash of color in the room, and tucked his gun in the back of his belt before re-entering the training room.

Each pod was smooth on the inside, and shaped to contain a humanoid; it was the most common shape Joe had run across, both while serving the Empire and while acting as Marvelous' first mate, and he accepted the pods' shape without question. Peering inside, he saw several tubes clustered in a couple of different locations, which seemed to be a distinct implication that the pods were meant for long-term use. There was a smoky glass panel in each lid at what would be approximately face height for most humanoids in the pods, presumably so the inhabitants could be visually identified.

The system appeared to be physically self-contained, as far as Joe could tell, unless there was something coming through the floor into the base of the array. It didn't look light enough to move to the Galleon in one piece, and poking at the nearest open pod didn't tell him how it might be disassembled. Joe sighed. "I need Doc for this, don't I." He reached toward his pocket to call Doc on the Mobilate when the pod at the far end caught his attention again. It looked occupied.

Leaving his Mobilate where it was, Joe glanced around the room again, but there were no clues other than the active display. He walked over to it, but the graphs weren't labeled in a script he could read. They were moving, slowly, with very little variability. He had no idea if that was a positive or a negative.

"I've found a survivor," he muttered, and turned to the pod to see if there was any possibility of extracting said survivor and asking it questions. There were no obvious release catches on the side of the pod's exterior, although a quick glance at the open pods confirmed an interior handle.

The face behind the smoky glass was only dimly visible, the glass darkened more than Joe would have guessed from the unoccupied pods. Maybe the window was more for the subject to look out before entering the simulation than it was for visual identification. There was a small tag affixed to the pod below the glass. As Joe moved closer to read it, the air seemed to rush out of the room and he staggered, barely catching himself on the pod.

The top of the tag was more of the incomprehensible script, but the bottom half of the tag was printed in standard Zangyack. It spelled out a single name: _Sid Bamick._

"Sid," he said, and then rubbed at the glass as though it would help him see the face inside more clearly. A thin layer of dust came off, and the face inside took on a more familiar cast. Joe searched around the outside of the pod, tugging futilely on the hatch. "Sid!"

It couldn't be his mentor inside. Joe tried to breathe past the crushing weight in his chest, fear and hope and apprehension all balled into one and squeezing the air out of his lungs. "You're dead," he said to the pod. "I killed you." His voice caught, and his vision blurred, and wet heat spilled over his cheeks. "I killed you, didn't I?" There was nothing on the pod that he could find that seemed like it would let him open it. Joe turned around and punched the wall.

"Maybe it wasn't you?" He spun back, hope outweighing everything else, breath coming quickly. "Maybe that's why you couldn't be reverted to human, it wasn't really you, just a copy, and I killed a machine."

The implications made him dizzy. If Sid were really here, if he were trapped inside some sort of virtual reality hallucination, and some sort of imprint of his brain had been used to make the monster that Joe had killed, he could save more than his mentor's soul. He could save his life.

Joe pressed his lips together. He was going to get Sid out of the machine if it killed him. He thought about trying to pry the pod open with the Gokai Sabre, but was stopped by the thought that forcing an end to the simulation might damage Sid's mind. He wasn't going to take that chance, not now. Joe wiped the moisture off his cheeks. There didn't seem to be any way of communicating with Sid from the outside, which just meant that he was going to have to go in.

There was a single button on the inside of the pod next to Sid, just below the smoked glass window. Joe pressed it, and text started scrolling across the second display screen. Incomprehensible text, followed by Zangyack Standard, instructing the user to strip and enter the pod for the joint simulation exercise. Joe took a deep breath, steadier and calmer now that he knew what he was going to do. He didn't plan on being in the pod for long, but just in case it had some sort of unexpected effect on the machinery, he stripped. Folding his clothes neatly, Joe placed them on the ground next to the pod and climbed gingerly inside.

What went where was fairly straightforward, and the hatch closed automatically as soon as Joe had settled his weight. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the door to the simulation room slide closed again, and rolled his eyes at the glitch. There was a brief moment of apprehension as the pod sealed itself closed, but he could feel the release catch by his right hand, and there was enough space to move in that he didn't precisely feel claustrophobic.

Cool mist hissed out of vents he hadn't noticed, and Joe felt his eyelids growing heavier. He resisted for a moment, apprehension coming back, but it wasn't like he could stay awake and still find Sid in his simulation. He dimly felt something settle across his forehead and something else fit across his nose and mouth. He hadn't seen anything covering Sid's face, he thought sluggishly, but it flitted away before he could properly grasp it. He felt his breathing slow and tried to look at the screen attached to his pod through the window, but his eyes had closed without his permission and he didn't have the strength to open them again.

Joe fell, slowly, until everything faded into a dull fog and then even that faded away into nothing.

There was something soft under him when awareness returned, and he was surrounded in warmth. Sunlight shone brightly against his closed eyelids, and Joe brought up a hand to dispel the glare as he blinked. For one brief and horrifying moment, he had no idea where he was, and then the memory of the array came rushing back. _I'm in a simulation_ , he reminded himself. _I'm here to get Sid out._

As if the thought had summoned him, Sid loomed out of what looked like nowhere to stand backlit by the sun.

"Sid," Joe said, staring up at a man he'd thought dead. Sid looked odd, and it took Joe several seconds to realize that Sid was wearing casual dark pants tucked into well-worn boots and a loose maroon shirt. He'd never seen Sid wear anything other than standard-issue Zangyack Special Forces armor. Color looked good on him.

"How do you know my name?" Sid said, and it was at that point that Joe recognized the expression on Sid's face. He was looking at Joe like a stranger.

"Sid, it's me," he said. "Joe. Joe Gibken."

"I don't know any Joe Gibken," Sid said, and even knowing that the words were part of whatever Sid had been led to believe inside the simulation, Joe felt a sharp pain in his heart.

"We were both in the Zangyack Special Forces," Joe said, sitting up slowly. A blanket fell away, and he pulled his hands out carefully and slowly. "You were my mentor."

"Zangyack?" Sid said, frowning. "The old Empire?"

"You could call it that," Joe said. "It's falling apart now."

"No," Sid said. "No, I remember you now. Right before… before…" His voice trailed off, and he looked incredibly lost for a few seconds. "Before it ended," he said. "Before we were all discharged."

"You weren't discharged," Joe said, still looking up at Sid. "I thought you died."

"I'm clearly not dead," Sid said. "Why would you think I was dead? You were discharged along with the rest of us, when the war ended."

"Do you remember the children?" Joe asked. "The ones I wouldn't shoot?"

"Children…" Sid whispered, and Joe could almost see the memory coming back. "Joe!" he said, genuinely surprised. "What are you doing here?"

"I came to rescue you," Joe said, standing. He put his hands on Sid's shoulders and looked him straight in the eye. "I need you to come with me," he said.

"I don't need rescuing," Sid said, leaning almost imperceptibly away from him. "Look, Joe, I'm really glad to see you." He paused, still edging backwards slowly. "Are you doing okay?"

"Me? I'm fine. I met up with the last surviving member of the Red Pirates. We've been fighting the Zangyack since the day you…" Joe's throat closed, and he blinked rapidly.

"Okay," Sid said, but it was clear that he was humoring Joe. "Why don't you come on downstairs? I'll get you something to drink." With a sense of surreality, Joe let his hands fall to his sides and followed Sid. The room he'd woken in was small, its furnishings consisting of a couch and a desk, and the room to which Sid led him was barely larger. "Wait here," Sid said, motioning for Joe to sit at a small table attached to a wall. It was below a window, and Joe looked out the window to see the familiar skyline of the city he'd grown up in. He didn't know if Sid had grown up in the same city, even if Sid hadn't grown up there, he'd certainly spent a lot of time in it. It wasn't a surprising location for Sid to create a home.

Sid came back with two mugs, both of them faintly battered and with the air of frequent use and careful care. Much like the rest of the furniture, Joe thought, which was both well used and well cared for. He accepted the nearest mug, and a familiar scent washed over him. It was the same sludge that had come in the morning mess while he had been in the Zangyack military, and it brought a wave of memory with it. Joe's throat closed for a second before he was able to smile at Sid. "I can't believe you drink this voluntarily," he said once he got his voice working again.

"Ah, it grew on me," Sid said. "Like mold. Morning just doesn't seem like morning without it."

"Sid," Joe said, but Sid was staring distantly out the window.

"So," Sid said, after enough time had passed for Joe to take a sip, decide that the taste wasn't worth the nostalgia, and put the cup down. "There you were, on my doorstep, Joe Gibken. How long has it been?"

"I got out a few years ago," Joe said. "When you – you broke me out of the cell, and when we couldn't escape together, you sacrificed yourself for me."

Sid shook his head, face closed off. "That's not how it happened."

"I thought you were dead," Joe said. "And then I met Barizorg, and I thought I could save you, and then I knew that there was no way to undo what the Empire did to you, and the only thing I could do was kill Barizorg and at least save your soul. But if you're here, then you're not dead. You weren't Barizorg. Barizorg was just a copy." He was rambling, talking far too much, but he couldn't stop.

"Joe!" Sid's voice broke him out of the loop of half-memory and self-recrimination. "Joe," Sid said again, more gently this time. "I don't know what you think happened, but I'm okay."

"No," Joe said, struggling to find the words. This wasn't what he was good at; he felt far more at home with actions than statements. "Sid, you…" He was clutching the mug so hard his knuckles were white, and it creaked alarmingly under his grip.

"Okay," Sid said, carefully taking the mug out of his hands. "Okay, Joe. Take it easy. Take it slow."

Joe knew that face; Sid was humoring him, going along with whatever Joe said until he had the opportunity to trip him up and take him somewhere Sid thought would help. He'd seen it before, with a recruit that hadn't borne the Zangyack training practices well. Joe had been impressed with Sid's ability to handle the recruit at the time, but finding himself on the receiving end was less than pleasant.

"Don't patronize me, Sid," he said. "I remember Zack."

The other man blinked and settled back. "What do you think happened?" he asked, and there was still that edge of manufactured sympathy in his voice. Joe ignored it this time.

"You remember the children," he said.

"I do," Sid allowed. "But that was a mistake. The Empire wouldn't have asked that we murder innocent civilians."

"You said," Joe continued, "that we'd been lied to. And that we should run, past the borders of the Empire, and that somewhere out in space, we'd meet each other again."

Sid nodded noncommittally.

"You threw yourself into the troops chasing us, giving me the chance to get away. I thought you died. Then I thought the Zangyack turned you into a cyborg, and I killed the cyborg, because if all I could save was your soul, then I was going to do it." Joe looked up from his hands, fingers twisted around each other. "But then I found you, here, plugged into a virtual reality array. I came in here to pull you out, Sid. I'm going to get you free of the Zangyack."

Sid took a deep breath, closed his mouth, and stood abruptly. He paced over to the window, hands folded behind his back in a painfully familiar gesture, head bowed. Joe started to speak, more than once, but the silence was too heavy, and each aborted effort only made it more leaden.

"Joe," Sid said finally, still looking out the window. "You have to know how crazy that sounds."

"Every word is true," Joe said.

"I – look." Sid turned to face him, the manufactured sympathy replaced with an expression of compassion that was both genuine and chilling. "I believe that you believe it," he said.

"It's true," Joe said again. He couldn't lose Sid at this point, not when he was so close.

"Okay." Sid paced over to him, and Joe looked up to meet his eyes. "Come with me, so that I know you're okay, and if everything checks out, then we'll talk about virtual reality simulations."

"Fine." Joe kept himself from snapping, just barely. He'd never expected that Sid simply wouldn't believe him, that he would have to prove he was trustworthy to the man who'd played such a huge part in making Joe who he was. "I'll go with you."

"Okay," Sid said again, resting a warm hand on Joe's shoulder. Joe couldn't help leaning into it, and then he heard the distinct tones of a ringing communication device. "Sorry," Sid said. "Give me a minute, Joe." He pulled something that looked surprisingly similar to an Earth cell phone out of one pocket, and stepped a few feet away.

The short distance did nothing to muffle his words, but Joe tried not to pay attention out of a sense of courtesy. Not actively eavesdropping didn't mean that Joe didn't hear Sid using terms of endearment and making explanations for either being late or cancelling plans altogether, and finally apologizing.

"Joe?" Sid was standing in front of him, fingers outspread and moving across Joe's field of vision, but Joe hadn't seen him move. Sid had started looking worried while Joe wasn't paying attention, but when Joe focused on him, he put his hand down. "There you are." He smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes.

"I'm ready," Joe said, and stood. "Let's go."

The stairs leading down were in the same state of general disrepair as the rest of the building; structurally sound, cosmetically less than appealing. Sid moved quickly, with the ease of long familiarity, and Joe found himself falling right back into the rhythm of following Sid's lead. He took up a defensive position a step back and slightly off to the side without thinking about it, automatically checking their surroundings. He didn't think about it until they reached the bottom of the stairs and Sid pushed open the external door in a decidedly non-regulation manner, and Joe choked off a demand to know what Sid was doing.

Sid seemed to register Joe's body language for the first time, and an expression of deep sadness crossed his features. He stood, door half-open, for a long moment, until Joe moved away from the wall and exited the building without checking the surrounding area first, and then followed.

"This way," Sid said, but there was less lightness to both his tone and his body language. Joe followed, deliberately not moving in the manner in which Sid had trained him, trying to walk like a civilian. Or a pirate.

The building where Sid took him wasn't one Joe was familiar with, though the city was large enough that no matter how long one lived there, there was always something new to find. It seemed like it should have been something he recognized, though; a hospital that big and that well-maintained was something Joe would have remembered.

Sid took him through one of the side doors instead of the main entrance, and through a winding maze of hallways that had no business being in any sort of hospital; the corridors were more suited to a madman's idea of a defensible building than a place of healing. Joe was beginning to lose patience when they finally arrived at Sid's intended destination.

"Hey," Sid said, knocking on a half-open door. "This is him," he said, this time clearly not speaking to Joe.

Joe shuffled partway out from behind Sid, leaving his mentor as a barrier between him and whoever Sid had just addressed. The individual in question was a stunningly beautiful person, although Joe couldn't tell at first glance, or at second, whether said individual was a man or a woman. The dark slacks and shirt under a white coat were just as aggressively androgynous as everything else.

"I'm Kaoru," said the individual, which still told Joe nothing, and held out a hand. Joe shook it, awkwardly. "Sid's asked me to run a few tests on you."

"Uh, yes." Joe looked at Sid for reassurance. Simulation or no, he had nothing but negative associations with medical tests. It was one of the first things he'd learned after being recruited into the Zangyack military.

"It's okay," Sid said, and he was using the artificially warm and comforting tone he'd used on Zack. He was _handling_ Joe again.

"Right." None of this was real, and it didn't matter what they did in here, because unless he actually died, it wouldn't have an effect on him in the outside world. Joe stepped forward. "Joe Gibken," he said.

"Nice to meet you, Joe," said Kaoru, with an odd little half-smile.

The tests Sid had apparently asked Kaoru to run, while Joe had either not been paying attention or had missed entirely, seemed to consist mainly of Joe holding very still while Kaoru waved various devices at him. The majority of them seemed to be concentrated around his head, but if he so much as twitched an eyeball, Kaoru made sympathetic noises and then told him to not move, Mr. Gibken, please, the equipment is very delicate.

Joe tried not to sigh. Once in a while, he also tried not to breathe. Sid, somewhat to Joe's surprise, stayed more or less in the room throughout the whole process, although he occasionally ducked outside the door with his phone in hand. On one of these occasions, Kaoru put down whatever instrument had been particularly sensitive that time and stepped into Joe's field of vision.

"You were in the military together?" The question was asked in a semi-casual tone, but Joe knew an interrogation when he heard one.

There was, however, no reason to lie. "Yes," he said. "Zangyack Special Forces."

"Before the war ended," Kaoru said, as if seeking clarification.

Joe sighed. "The war didn't end so much as the Zangyack Emperor was defeated and the Empire started falling apart," he said. "Sid died – was recaptured before that, though."

"Uh huh," Kaoru said. "Extend your arm, please, and make a fist."

Blood wasn't the only fluid Kaoru took and carefully labeled samples of, and each time Joe reminded himself that the needles weren't real and that Kaoru wasn't performing experiments on him, and that this was not the Zangyack Empire. He felt that Kaoru watched and catalogued his reaction every time, which only served to put him more on edge. He was wasting time.

It occurred to Joe that he hadn't sent a check-in ping to the Galleon before climbing into the array, and that the Galleon would then alert the rest of his crewmates to his failure to demonstrate that he was alive and well. There was a distinct possibility that he was going to climb out of the pod surrounded by the entire crew. He didn't think Sid would handle that well, which meant that this needed to be wrapped up quickly enough for him to try to control Sid's introduction to the Gokaigers.

Coming back to reality was going to be hard enough for Sid; he didn't need one of Marvelous' interrogations on top of it. Joe glanced at the door, which had been closed for far too long, and then back at Kaoru, who was starting to look distinctly nervous. A brush of hair out of Kaoru's eyes revealed the distinct silver bud of a short-range communicator in Kaoru's ear, which explained why Kaoru had occasionally had a listening expression while in a silent room. Joe narrowed his eyes.

"What's going on?" he asked.

"Nothing," Kaoru said, yet another needle in hand. This one was full of clear liquid, instead of being empty for collection, and Joe instinctively moved away. He put the examination chair he'd spent far too much time sitting on top of between himself and the medic and pulled the short tube out of the crook of his elbow. Red spilled over his fingers to patter on the floor, and he pressed down on it instinctively.

"What are you doing?" Joe asked, letting his voice harden.

"It's for your own safety," Kaoru said, which was exactly the wrong line to take.

Joe moved slowly toward the door, with Kaoru making a clear bid to intercept. Joe reached behind himself without looking, groping along the counter until he found something heavy, and pitched it at the needle still in Kaoru's hand. Kaoru failed to dodge quickly enough, and the contents of the syringe splashed over the floor. "Don't lie to me," Joe said.

Kaoru dove toward him, moving quickly and gracefully with an economy of movement that spoke clearly of Zangyack military training. Kaoru was clearly one of the elite, someone who'd received the same training as Sid and as Joe himself. All that meant was that Joe knew how to counter it. He caught Kaoru's outstretched fist and ducked to the side, using Kaoru's momentum to throw his opponent into the door.

The door shuddered open under the impact, spilling Kaoru into the hallway beyond. Kaoru took it in stride, turning the throw into a smooth tumble and coming up standing. Joe edged out the door, eyes nominally on Kaoru while he searched for Sid in his peripheral vision.

Not paying enough attention to anything, Joe found himself blindsided by a Gormin staff sweeping across his ribs. He went down hard, hearing something crack, and shook the hair out of his eyes. The hallway was full of Gormin troopers, and they were giving Kaoru a wide berth. Sid was nowhere to be seen, at least not from Joe's vantage point on the floor.

"Traitors to the empire cannot be tolerated," Kaoru said. "Those harboring traitors suffer the same fate."

"End of the war, ha," Joe muttered. His Gokai Gun was exactly where it should have been. He dropped Kaoru with a single well-placed shot, and pushed himself upwards to meet the suddenly surging tide of Gormin sailors. Something in his side popped, and his vision whited out for a second. When it came back, he saw Sid, struggling against the horde of Gormin. "Sid!" he shouted, and charged forward.

His Gokai Sabre was in his hand without conscious thought, and Joe danced. Pain in his side notwithstanding, he was on familiar ground. The Gormin reacted the way they always reacted, slow and predictable enough for him to cut through them. He could see the resolution settle over Sid's face, and the moment when Sid made his decision.

Without a weapon, fighting with his bare hands, Sid was magnificent. Joe reached him, breathing heavily, as the fight spilled out of the building into the bright sunlight. Gormin pouring out of the door behind them and a trio of Sugormin waiting bare meters away, Joe tossed the Sabre to Sid. Sid tossed it right back, and Joe caught it reflexively.

"You need that more than I do," Sid said.

"Do you believe me now?" Joe asked, or meant to. His breath caught before he got more than a few syllables out. He coughed and choked, bending almost double. Red dotted the ground in front of him when he straightened up again to face the curiously still army that had all but surrounded them.

"I believe that something isn't right," Sid said. "But I'm not going to leave you."

The words touched a ball of hurt so deep Joe hadn't even known it was there until it started to fade away, the repeated experience of first Sid and then Marvelous sending Joe away _for his own safety_ and sacrificing themselves instead of fighting with him. "Okay, then," Joe said, and fired on the Sugormin.

As if that had been a signal, the army raced forward. Joe lost all sense of time, his only clear impression the act of pressing the Gokai Gun into Sid's hands and facing down a Sugormin officer with a single Gokai Sabre. It felt wrong, not to have exchanged the gun for a second sword, but Joe was nothing if not adaptable. Both hands on the Sabre's hilt, Joe met the Sugormin's claws with the blade and matched it blow for blow.

The Sugormin fell after far too many agonizing moments, and Joe found himself in a little clear space. "Sid!" he shouted, the word catching in his throat.

"Right behind you," Sid murmured, and Joe glanced over his shoulder. Sid was uninjured, firing the Gokai Gun as if he'd been practicing with it for years. Gormin after Gormin crumpled to the ground, missing bits and pieces of their skulls. Sid was every bit as good with the gun as he had been with his blade, each shot a perfectly aligned headshot.

For a few brief seconds, Joe forgot that none of the fight was real and began to hope that they would make it out alive after all. "We break northwest," he said. "Stay together. No matter what."

"You have my word," Sid said, and the Gormin swarmed forward again.

Joe was hyperaware of Sid this time, and did his best to put up some kind of defensive perimeter so that Sid could keep taking potshots at the Sugormin. Sid inexplicably failed to focus on the Sugormin, clearly the greater threat, insisting instead on trying to protect Joe. It wasn't going to work; even in his adrenaline-fueled haze, Joe could tell. They were so close.

One brief second, that was all Joe needed, and he got it. The Gormin fell back, the Sugormin stalking forward. In the all too brief pause before the Sugormin attacked, Joe grabbed Sid and bolted. He thought they were going to make it, the few Gormin between them and clear space falling back in surprise, and then something lodged itself under his broken rib from behind.

Joe stumbled, going to the ground with Sid skidding to a halt just beyond him.

"Joe, come on!" Sid tried to pull him to his feet, but Joe couldn't move. He could barely breathe, the pain in his chest giving way to a crushing weight. Something trickled down the side of his chin as he tried to speak, but the words wouldn't come. Sid fell to his knees, pulling Joe up against his chest and firing on the advancing Gormin. Joe could see them fall back, hesitating, and looked up at Sid, once again backlit by the sun.

"Sid," he said, finally managing to pull in enough air to speak.

"Stop talking," Sid said. "I'm going to get you out of here." He inched backwards, pulling Joe with him, other hand holding the Gokai Gun unwaveringly trained on the mass of Gormin bare meters away.

"Sid, it's not real," Joe said, each word a monumental effort. "Leave the simulation."

"How?" Were those tears streaking Sid's cheeks? No, surely not. Sid didn't cry. Joe had never seen Sid cry. It was a trick of the light.

"Just want to leave," Joe said. It was, impossibly, harder to breathe, Sid's face blurring and dissolving into colorless fog. "I'm okay if you get out," he said, willing Sid to hear him and believe, and the bright sky fell over him in a rush of deafening silence.


	6. Sid

Sky gave way to bright overhead lights and Sid's impossibly warm hands on his shoulders. "Joe!"

Joe took in a shuddering breath, reveling the ease and lightness of it, and found himself with his face crushed against Sid's chest. "I'm okay," he said, the words muffled. Sid had found the time to get dressed at some point, wearing a mostly clean-smelling set of Zangyack Special Forces armor. "I can't breathe," he said, which was only partly true.

Sid pulled back, eyes searching Joe's face, and Joe was suddenly acutely aware of his nudity. The pod provided a bare minimum of modesty only. "You're sure you're okay," Sid said. Joe nodded, not trusting his voice. He'd done it, by some insane twist of fate, he'd stumbled on Sid and brought him back. "Absolutely sure," Sid repeated, smoothing the hair back from Joe's face.

"Y-yes," Joe managed, proud of how steady his voice was. "Are _you_ okay?" It had to be a shock, finding out that what Sid had thought was life post-Zangyack was a lie. At the very least, they had some privacy; he hadn't been inside the simulation long enough for anyone to come looking, or at least not long enough for anyone to find him.

"This is not what I expected," Sid admitted. "It's all true, then."

"Every word," Joe said softly. Sid didn't seem inclined to move, so Joe added, "Sid, I should get dressed."

"In a minute," Sid said. He leaned forward, one hand still cupping Joe's face, and kissed him carefully on the lips.

Joe flinched in surprise, but when Sid made as if to break off, Joe pulled him back. It felt _right_. It could have been minutes or hours later that they finally separated, Joe's fingers tangled in Sid's hair. Sid rested his forehead against Joe's for a brief moment, then smiled and kissed him again, briefly, on the mouth before straightening. Joe's hands trailed downwards, and Sid caught them in his own.

"I've been wanting to do that," Sid said.

"You could have." Joe's heart was pounding, thoughts racing almost through a freefall of how Marvelous and the rest of the crew would accept this new development. Sid wasn't crew, wasn't part of the understanding the Gokaigers shared. But he was _Joe's_ , and that should make it all right. _Shouldn't it?_ "You could have," he repeated.

Sid shook his head. "Wouldn't have been right, before," he said. "You wouldn't have been free to say no."

Joe opened his mouth to protest that Sid wouldn't have done anything that Joe didn't want, and then closed it again, because Sid wasn't wrong. The power structure of the Zangyack military didn't allow for dissent from the lower ranks. "Now's okay," he said instead, and Sid smiled for a half second.

"You should put some clothes on," he said, letting go of Joe's hands and stepping back far enough for Joe to climb out of the pod.

"Now I don't want to," Joe grumbled. Not that there was anything going on that he did or didn't want Sid to see, but there was some definite stirrings of interest in places other than his brain that could develop very quickly under a wide range of circumstances. None of which included putting his clothes back on.

Sid laughed, the sound full of warmth and inviting Joe to share the humor with him, rather than mocking him. "You didn't come here alone," he reminded Joe. "You said something about a crew."

"Shit." Joe scrambled out of the pod, finding his neatly folded clothes exactly where he'd left them. The Mobilate was in his pocket, and he sent the last non-verbal check-in ping to the Galleon. It sent back a message informing him that his crewmates had been notified of his status. "Just in time," he said, and felt the briefest feather-light touch just above his hips.

"Sorry," Sid said, hand still outstretched. "You should really get dressed." He dropped his hand and turned to face the wall of screens. None of them were showing data; the two directly in front of the pods they'd occupied were frozen, graphs faded out under a pulsing green overlay in a script Joe couldn't read.

"Right," Joe said, although pulling on his clothes was almost the last thing he wanted to do. Not wanting to be interrupted was the only impetus that kept him going, although the fact that he'd made the check-in on time meant that they had at least an hour before anyone would be notified to come looking. Joe quashed the thought. There would be enough time later.

"So there was a copy of me," Sid said, and it was like a wave of cold water.

"Barizorg," Joe said, softly.

"And you found a partner," Sid said, without a trace of jealousy or resentment. Warmth blossomed in Joe's chest at that.

"I found a crew," he said. "It's a long story."

Sid cocked his head slightly to the side. With one eye covered by the Zangyack standard issue half-visor, it made him look almost artificial. Joe suppressed the urge to rip the thing off Sid's face. "How long?" he asked, and hearing him speak helped.

"Uh." Joe blinked.

Sid smiled the warm smile Joe remembered so well. "Let's go find them, then. At least one of them must be more talkative than you are."

"I talk," Joe said.

"You, my friend," said Sid, "never use three words when you can just use one, and you don't even use that if you think you can just stare your meaning across."

Joe glared at him indignantly. That definitely wasn't one of his habits.

"Right. Exactly," Sid had the audacity to say. "Now, where's this pirate crew of yours?" He paused. "Although, really, you're less of a pirate than an aggressive bullet salesman."

Joe gave Sid a half-hearted glare for the terrible joke while he considered. Marvelous was likely to be the easiest to find, what with the command decks having the smallest area of physical space, but Joe wanted the rest of the crew behind him when he introduced Sid to Marvelous. It wasn't that he thought he'd done something wrong, by letting Sid kiss him, he told himself. "All over," he said, finally, and pulled the Mobilate out of his pocket again.

The Mobilate had barely started to ring before Luka's voice poured through the speaker. "Joe! Where have you been?"

"Where are you?" Joe asked. He could hear sounds of fighting behind her, and Ahim's voice came through clearly in the background. He couldn't hear either Doc or Gai, but at least two of his crewmates were in trouble.

Luka told him, giving him vague directions that ended with "You'll be able to find us when you get here" before cutting communication.

"Trouble?" Sid asked.

Joe nodded, and they made for the door. The door refused to open. _Of course it did_ , Joe thought, and lost all semblance of patience with the glitching electronics on the freighter. "Stand back," he said, and summoned the Gokai Sabre. It sliced through the door easily, and Joe kicked the pieces out of the way. His pack was blocking the door to the hall, just as he'd left it, although the hallway lights had gone from dim to overly bright while he'd been in the pod.

Sid stepped over the pack, checking the hallway in both directions. Joe tugged the pack out of the doorway and handed Sid the Sabre; he preferred it, but he also wasn't about to not acknowledge that Sid was better with a blade than he was.

"Are you sure?" Sid asked.

"For now, just take it," Joe said, and took off at a loping run. It was a pace he could have kept up for hours, and Sid fell in easily at his side.

Luka had directed Joe toward the center of the ship, somewhere between the pressurized cargo section and the engines. He could hear the sounds of combat long before they got anywhere near the fight, the distinctive crack of the Gokai Guns and the crackling hum of the Sabres. Joe rounded a corner to see a veritable tide of Gormin sailors trying to overwhelm Ahim and Luka.

"This looks familiar," Sid said, somewhat grimly.

"Makes it easier," Joe said, and started trying to break through the ranks of Gormin.

Luka had appropriated Ahim's Sabre and was fighting two-handed; it wasn't the style or skill that Joe fought with, but she kept the area directly around her clear. Ahim stood at Luka's back, or where Luka's back most often was, pistols in both hands.

Joe found himself nearly overwhelmed in the first few moments, with a less familiar weapon in hand and only one at that. Sid stood over him, Sabre moving almost too quickly for Joe to follow even if he tried, and slowly Joe found a sense of rhythm. The Gormin didn't let up, though, and it seemed as though for every one they dropped, two more swarmed out of the walls.

"Where are they all coming from?" Luka demanded, breathing heavily.

No one had an answer, but Joe and Sid had finally broken through the Gormin ranks and the four of them stood together. The Gormin fell back as soon as Joe reached his crewmates, eerily silent. Joe kept both hands on his Gokai Gun, kept it aimed at the crowd, and no one else lowered their weapons either.

"Joe," Ahim said, and he knew her eyes were flicking back and forth even if she was technically standing behind them. "I don't believe we've been introduced to your friend."

"Long story," Joe said. "This is Sid Bamick." He plowed on, not giving either Ahim or Luka a chance to react. He didn't know if Marvelous had told them about Sid and his connection to Barizorg; he certainly hadn't, although Ahim had been with him when the former Liveman member had found the data pad containing Barizorg's blueprints, and they'd all seen him freeze when he'd first seen Barizorg use Sid's signature move. "Sid, this is Ahim, and Luka. My crewmates. The Gokaigers."

"Pirates," Sid said.

"Yes." Joe would have said more, but the ranks of Gormin sailors parted in a wave to let a pair of Dogormin bodyguards through.

"That is not promising," Luka muttered, quietly enough that Joe wasn't sure if anyone else heard her.

No member of the Imperial family followed the bodyguards, though, nor did an Action Commander. Joe narrowed his eyes; the Dogormin pairs only showed up on specific Imperial business, and there was no remnant of the Empire this far out. No manned remnant of the Empire, that was.

"We can't use the Ranger Keys," Ahim said, voice low and urgent. "We can't trigger a cascade failure."

"No," Joe said slowly. "We can't trigger a cascade failure _yet_."

"Ah," Ahim said. "A distraction?"

"Joe," Sid said, voice just as low as Ahim's. "What are you doing?"

"Aim at the ceiling," Joe said, and Ahim nodded. Luka crossed both Sabres, and at Joe's roared signal, they brought the roof above the Dogormin crashing down.

Being buried under three decks' worth of rubble wasn't going to hold the Dogormin for long, but it didn't have to. Joe led the hectic flight away from the field toward the cargo section, and Luka sabotaged as many doors as she could along their haphazard route.

The doors between the engineering and cargo sections were harder to manipulate, but Sid stepped in and twisted a few wires around. A heavy blast door dropped down, sealing the passageway. "That's one down," he said. "So what are we doing?"

"If we can create a cascade failure, the entire freighter goes up," Luka said, enlightenment spreading over her face. "You just want to get the others first."

"Thus, the distraction," Ahim finished.

"Clever," Sid said, and Joe ducked his head to hide the smile that he couldn't stop. Luka noticed it anyway.

"Joe Gibken, you're blushing," she said, grinning delightedly.

"No, I'm not," Joe protested, but he could feel his cheeks burning.

"Ahim, he's blushing. We tell him nice things all the time, and he just stares at us. One nice word from this guy, and look." Luka's grin hadn't gone away. If anything, it had gotten wider.

"Don't we have somewhere to be?" Joe asked, stalking forward. His dramatic motion was ruined by the fact that he had no idea where Gai and Doc might be, and he came to a halt only a few steps away.

Ahim was already trying to connect to their teammates, Joe saw when he looked over his shoulder, but Luka was circling Sid like a stalking cat. "So you're Sid," he heard her say, and did not feel that this was not going to go well.

"Sid Bamick," Sid said, holding out a hand for her to shake. Luka looked at it oddly; the handshake was a Zangyack peculiarity, Joe remembered, and Luka preferred not to touch people unless she was the one to initiate physical contact. "I see a reputation precedes me."

"Luka Millfy," she said. "Joe doesn't talk much. You might have noticed. But he's mentioned you."

"I've noticed," Sid said dryly, the corners of his eyes crinkling as he smiled. "It's one of his more endearing traits."

"Endearing. Yes." Luka looked between the two of them. "I thought you were dead," she said bluntly.

"So Joe says," Sid said. "I don't know what to tell you."

"Explanations come later," Joe interrupted. Ahim had finished her conversation, presumably with their teammates, and was looking at the rest of the expectantly. "Ahim?"

"This way." Ahim stepped daintily forward, somehow managing to give off a regal air while walking at a speed that had the rest of them half-jogging to match. "They ran into some difficulties," she added, half-turning her head for clarity. "Gai is injured."

"How badly?" Joe asked.

"Doc's not sure." Ahim picked up the pace, gliding forward, and Joe heard the sound of crashing doors coming from somewhere behind them.

"Just keeps getting better," Luka said.

"Is it always like this?" Sid wanted to know.

"Oh, you showed up on an easy day," Luka said, and Joe wasn't entirely sure she wasn't flirting with Sid. He wasn't sure whether he was more upset that she was doing it, or that she was doing it openly.

"Glad to know Joe wasn't bored after we, ah, separated," Sid said, and it was the little half-smile that made it clear he was flirting right back. Luka threw back her head and laughed, without breaking stride.

"I like this one," she said. "We'll petition Marvelous to keep him."

"Focus, please," Joe said, and Luka rolled her eyes.

Sid looked contrite, but there was an edge of something else there that Joe couldn't identify, and he suddenly felt guilty on top of everything else. Sid had just had his entire world turned upside down; the fact that it hadn't technically been a real world wouldn't have made much difference to Sid's experience of it. The guilt was swiftly followed by irritation for being guilty. Sid wasn't a delicately fragile flower who needed protecting.

"The others should be two decks above us," Ahim said, coming to an intersection. Joe had no idea how she could tell; all the half-levels and stairs and ladders made the place a confusing maze, and couldn't possibly be an efficient storage system.

"Up we go," Sid said. "I'll take point."

There was an access tunnel Joe hadn't noticed, leading straight up and down, and Sid climbed into it with Joe's Gokai Sabre firmly stuck in his belt.

"All clear," Sid called. Ahim and then Luka followed him in. Joe was about to climb in when the first Gormin sailor rounded the corner. It froze for half a second and then signaled to its comrades.

"Dammit." Joe dropped the Gormin with a single shot, but it was too late. He climbed into the access tunnel, pulling the door shut behind him.

"What happened?" Luka asked.

"Gormin," he said shortly. "Move faster. And somebody hand me a Sabre."

A Sabre was passed down, handle first; Joe had no idea whose it was, just that it wasn't his. He started slicing at the supports holding the ladder to the wall, as far down past the door as he could reach, kicking the pieces of it down the vertical tunnel into the darkness below.

"What are you doing?" Ahim asked.

"Keep going!" Joe hissed. "I'll be right behind you!"

The door started to open, and Joe stabbed the Sabre into the internal control panel. The door shuddered to a halt, a bare few centimeters open, but enough for an arm and a projectile weapon. If Joe was lucky, the door hadn't opened far enough to get the business end of a Gormin cudgel through. A rhythmic banging at the door told him that he was lucky enough that they needed to beat the door down, but not lucky enough that they weren't going to manage it.

Joe worked his way up the ladder, trying to cut it away from the wall as he went. It was slow going, but he only needed to get rid of enough that the Gormin couldn't reach the lowest rung, and he thought he was nearly there.

What Joe thought was the final piece of ladder fell below his feet and he focused on climbing just as the first shot whizzed past his shoulder. There wasn't much he could do about that except to keep going upwards, but the Gormin hadn't squeezed off more than another couple of shots – all of which missed him – before friendly fire started raining down from above.

A bullet from his crewmates' Gokai Guns wouldn't leave him any less dead than a Gormin projectile. Joe made the smallest target out of himself that he possibly could and kept going. It felt like a small eternity before he reached the open door, Ahim and Luka lying flat on the ground and firing downwards and Sid standing over them with Joe's Sabre in hand.

"Now," Sid said, and Joe heard _Final Wave!_ scream out from the Gokai Guns as Sid bodily hauled him to safety. Ahim and Luka rolled out of the doorway as it slid shut and then ground to a halt. Superheated air hissed out of the narrow crack, and Joe heard the satisfying thunder of an explosion below them.

"That should destabilize things," Luka said with some satisfaction, but she was already moving down the hall. That hadn't been the only group of Gormin searching for them, certainly. Joe moved to catch up and hand the Sabre back to Luka. As she took it, he noticed red on his hands. Luka saw it too, and hurriedly stashed the Sabre away before grabbing at him.

Joe dodged, but Sid was right behind him. Two things registered simultaneously; Sid's attempt to stifle a grunt of pain and Luka latching onto his hands.

"Where did this come from?" Luka asked, turning his hands over and then all but flinging them aside to inspect Joe.

Joe dodged again, turning to face Sid and poking a spot on the side of his jacket that looked just a little darker than everything else. The wetness under his finger confirmed it before Sid's wince did. "Sid," he said.

"It's fine." Sid batted Joe's hands out of the way and pulled his jacket straighter. "The armor caught most of it."

"It's not fine," Joe said.

"We don't have time, and it's stopped bleeding. Mostly." Sid turned Joe around in the direction Ahim had been going. "Seriously, it's fine. Would I lie to you?"

"You mean like, We'll meet out there in space somewhere?" Joe shot back, low and furious.

"Not now," Sid said. "I promise. Later, okay? Right now your – your crewmates need help."

"Later," Joe said, staring intently at Sid. If Sid took it as agreement, he wasn't going to argue, but there was no way Joe was going to let him play rear defense now. He herded Sid right behind Ahim, letting Luka go third, and took up the final position. Not that it ended up mattering much; they found Doc only a few minutes later and no sign of Gormin sailors or the pair of Dogormin they'd escaped earlier. Doc appeared out of what looked like nowhere abruptly enough that Joe nearly shot him reflexively, and once he'd gotten over that surprise, herded them inside an empty room.

Gai was leaning against a wall, still on his feet although one look at his face made Joe question whether the only thing holding Gai up was the wall in question. His left arm was bound across his abdomen, and something about his shoulder just looked out of place. "Yo," he said, waving his right hand with a ghost of his usual grin. "Turns out this boat is less abandoned than we thought it was."

"Ship," Doc said, absently, and then appeared to see Sid for the first time. "Who's that?"

"Introductions can wait," Joe said, but his next words were cut off by Sid approaching Gai and saying something too quiet for the rest of the room to hear. Gai nodded, and Joe unbound the shoulder.

"Are you ready?" Sid asked, but before he'd gotten past the first word, he snapped Gai's shoulder back into place. Gai screamed, and then choked it off, sagging against the wall. "Easy there," Sid said, lightly touching along Gai's collarbone. He bound Gai's arm up swiftly again, tying it off so that it couldn't move. "The collarbone is broken, and he needs internal scans sooner rather than later, just in case."

Gai gave a shaky thumbs up with is right hand, a little of the color returning to his face. "Just point me in the right direction, I'm good to go," he said. It would have been more convincing if he hadn't been sliding down the wall as he said it. "In just a minute."

"Where's Marvelous?" Joe asked.

"I haven't been able to reach him," Doc said. "You haven't either?"

"He didn't pick up when either Ahim or I called," Luka said. "Joe?"

"I'm trying now," Joe said. "You two explain the plan."

The quiet murmur of Ahim and Luka explaining how they were going to explode the freighter and every Zangyack trooper on board was a counterpoint to the endless ringing on Joe's Mobilate. Marvelous not answering the others was bad enough, but when it was Joe's call not going through, it was somehow worse. "Nothing," he said finally, after listening to his Mobilate try to establish connection for far too long.

"This Marvelous is in charge?" Sid asked.

"He's our captain," Joe said, wearily. "The Gokai Galleon is his ship."

"He's the former member of the Red Pirates," Sid said, recognition dawning. "The only survivor."

"That's him." Joe slammed a fist into the wall. Getting Sid back only to lose Marvelous would be a cruel joke, he couldn't help but think, even though he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Marvelous could handle whatever a surprise Zangyack invasion would throw at him.

Sid, wisely, didn't offer any platitudes. "So what's the plan, boss?" he said.

"I – what?" Joe stared at him.

"You're next in the chain of command, right?" Sid glanced around at the rest of the crew. "It's your call."

"Right." Not that any one of them wasn't capable of making decisions, but it was Joe's job to maintain a sense of structure, and as much as he might want to fall back into the familiar habit of following Sid's lead, this wasn't Sid's crew. That was a leftover impulse that he thought he'd left behind a long time ago, and Joe set it aside. "We go up to the command deck, get Marvelous and the Galleon, and blow this thing to hell."

"There you are," Luka said, right over Ahim and Doc's near-unanimous "Understood." Gai just nodded, raising his right hand in a thumbs up.

"Before we go," Joe said, and looked at Sid.

"I told you it was fine," Sid muttered, but he peeled off the armor and jacket, and pulled up his undershirt. The Zangyack bullet had scored an ugly cut along his ribs, but the bleeding had stopped. Joe slapped a pressure bandage on it anyway; there was no point in letting the samples he'd stowed in his pack go to waste.

"Is anyone else bleeding?" he asked.

"If I am, it's on the inside," Gai said. "Where the blood is supposed to be." He was half-smiling as he said it, and then his eyes widened. "That was a joke! A joke!"

"It may not have been funny," Ahim said, offering Gai a hand up. He ignored it, taking it only when his initial attempt to stand failed.

"Super Sentai laugh in the face of danger," Gai said. "Ow." Joe resolved to keep a closer eye on Gai.

"Can you use the spear?" he asked.

Gai concentrated for a moment and then shook his head. "Sorry," he said. "It won't budge unless I transform."

"Okay." Joe nodded, and turned to Sid. "Standard formation, Gai in the middle. You stay on his left. Doc, you're right behind them."

"Would you prefer Luka or me to take the rear?" Ahim asked.

"Ahim, if you would. Luka, on Gai's right."

Gai looked as though he wanted to protest, but something in Joe's face made him back off. Weapons were redistributed, at Ahim's suggestion; Joe got his Sabre back, along with Doc's, while Gai held onto Joe's Gun with his good hand. Doc kept his own Gokai Gun, flashing Joe a nervous smile as he handed his Sabre over. Sid borrowed Ahim's Sabre, Luka kept her own, and Ahim held both remaining pistols in her position as rear guard.

"Try not to die," Joe said, finally, as they were all staring at him waiting for him to say something before moving out.

"Right," Luka said, drawing out the vowel, but she followed readily enough.

The hall was more or less empty as they started through it, which was enough to make Joe more nervous than he had been to begin with. The freighter was nearly silent, and he found himself straining to hear every sound, evaluate it for the presence of a potential threat. It didn't help that the sounds his crewmates made were louder than anything else in the immediate vicinity, for all that they were actually trying to be quiet.

The first real hitch came when trying to move as far upwards as possible before moving laterally across to the command decks; there was no way Gai could climb a ladder through one of the access shafts, which meant a nightmarish trip up and down more staircases than Joe could count. Gai didn't handle those particularly well, either, but he gritted his teeth and persevered.

Gormin sailors found them twice before they got out of the cargo hold, moving in groups of four in each case, and both times the groups were swiftly dispatched. Joe wasn't sure in either case whether any of the Gormin had managed to get off a call to the Dogormin he assumed were in charge, but they weren't swarmed after either encounter. _That means nothing_ , he reminded himself. Dogormin weren't above lulling opponents into a false sense of security and then setting traps.

The door out of the top deck of the cargo sector stood open when they reached it, and that made Joe instantly suspicious. The freighter had demonstrated glitches in its internal workings, but those had tended more towards making doors harder to open instead of easier. He didn't trust it.

"Let me go check," Sid said. Joe had paused their group off to the side, around a corner from the invitingly open door and just barely out of sight.

"No." Joe shook his head. "We're not splitting up."

"This isn't splitting up. This is reconnaissance."

"This is how we got into trouble the first time," Joe snapped. He'd had Sid trying to contact Marvelous as they made their way up and across the freighter, but none of the attempts to connect had been answered, and the pit in Joe's stomach just kept twisting.

"With all due respect, I don't think you're looking at the situation entirely clearly," Sid said.

Joe had forgotten how stubborn Sid was, but he wasn't about to back down. He wasn't about to risk Sid. "All of you stay here until I give you the signal."

"You know, I'm actually the one of us with the most practice at being sneaky," Luka said, on top of Doc insisting that his being the quickest out of all of them meant that he was the best choice for a lookout while Ahim made a case for being a trained observer. Even Gai insisted that his injury would give them the element of surprise, if there actually turned out to be a trap on the other side of the door.

"All of you be quiet," Joe snapped again, and that was when the Dogormin started firing. The crew scattered, Luka pulling Gai out of the line of fire by his good arm. Sid ran straight towards them, brandishing his borrowed blade, and Joe had no choice but to follow.

In retrospect, the fact that the Dogormin had split up – something Joe had never seen them do before – was the only reason neither of them were killed or even maimed during the all-but-suicidal charge. Sid batted away the blasts from the single Dogormin's staff as it fired, leaving Joe clear to launch an all-out assault. Behind the Dogormin were swarms of Gormin sailors, but Joe couldn't afford to take his eyes off the Dogormin for a microsecond. He heard the distinctive sound of the Gokai Guns from behind him, and had to trust that his crew would keep the Gormin out of the way.

"Sid," Joe called, not looking at the other man. "Technique." He hoped Sid would interpret that the way Joe had meant it – a few seconds of breathing room for Joe to set up the technique he'd learned from Sid – and tossed Doc's Sabre over to Sid.

"Gotcha," Sid called back, and since Joe hadn't heard the Sabre hit the floor, he assumed Sid had it. A quick glance a bare second later proved him right, when Sid started pressing hard and the Dogormin diverted most of its attention to the new threat.

Joe stepped back, form and position perfect, and pushed energy through his Sabre the way Sid had taught him. The air glowed in an arc, and Sid leapt clear just before Joe brought the Sabre across the inscribed arc and sent the whole mess rocketing toward the Dogormin.

The bodyguard was unprepared, taking the blast full on the chest. Joe tried to duck under the resulting explosion, but the edge of the shockwave still knocked him into the wall. Sid pulled him back out of it, limping a little and wincing.

"Where's everyone else?" Joe asked. His voice sounded muffled in his own ears, barely audible over the ringing.

"Fine," Sid said, apparently having the same trouble.

The other four had managed to reach something resembling cover, and no one was in any worse shape than they had been before Joe nearly blew a hole in the freighter. As though the thought had been an omen, the bulkhead above them cracked. Joe cursed, and his crewmates looked up almost in unison to see the crack widen as air started to vent.

"Move it!" Sid shouted, in the tone he'd used on new recruits back when he and Joe had been assigned to the same unit, and the six of them bolted for the open door. Joe felt the tug of rushing air growing stronger, swiftly reaching almost hurricane-like speed, and he crossed the threshold.

"The door," Ahim said, but Doc was already bent over the panel. Luka stood between him and the door, sheltering him as best she could from the gale-force winds while the rest of them clung to the wall. The heavy blast door finally rolled shut, cutting off the sound of the wind. Joe's ears hurt, feeling both raw and as though they were full of cotton, and he couldn't shake the sense that the room was revolving slowly around him.

"This may complicate matters," Sid said.

"I don't know how many doors are open," Doc said, taking the statement at face value. "But it'll take time for the air to entirely leak out." He paused. "We'd die way before that, though."

"Then we should move quickly." Joe had caught the gist of what Doc had said only by watching his lips closely; he could barely hear anything out of his left ear and the right wasn't much better. He reached toward his ear, with the intent of cleaning it out, but Ahim caught his hand. He frowned at her, and she touched her finger lightly to the skin just below his ear. It came away bloody. Joe stifled a groan.

There was little to no point in trying to maintain a formation at this point; Joe just made sure Gai was in the middle of the group and set Luka in front for the simple reason that she'd been through at least part of the engineering section and had the best shot of leading them toward the command decks. That Luka also wasn't struggling with a lingering sense of vertigo also helped.

No part of it was going to be that easy, Joe discovered when they found the other Dogormin. It was guarding what Ahim thought was the most direct route of access to the bridge, and by some miracle of either luck or appropriately attentive crew members, it didn't see them before they saw it. Joe was fairly sure it hadn't seen them at all, given the lack of assault happening as they skulked around a corner.

"Go around?" he said. Ahim shook her head.

"We have to move past that point no matter what route we take," she said. "Unless we wanted to move through the walls." She didn't have to say that Gai wasn't going to be able to do the climbing and crawling necessary for the maintenance tunnel route, or that Sid's limp had gotten worse enough to probably take him out of the running as well.

"No," Joe said. "We need a distraction." He thought for a moment. "What can we make explode?"

The answer to that question turned out to be _a lot_. The answer to what they could blow up without cracking the ship's hull again was a much shorter list, and the hastily-laid plan eventually involved leaving Joe to wait with Gai and Sid while Doc took Luka and Ahim off to break something in the most flamboyant manner possible while not actually being in its immediate vicinity. Joe stiffened when the question of splitting up came up again, but Gai wasn't going to move quickly enough, and neither was Sid. Joe himself wasn't at a hundred percent; he had to finally admit that the vertigo wasn't improving.

The plan went off with barely a hitch, the Dogormin sending Gormin sailors and then following itself when not one but a series of explosions sounded from somewhere below the deck. Joe felt them more than heard them, and wasn't sure that it wasn't all in his head until he saw both Sid and Gai reacting to the vibration. It had barely faded when the door the Dogormin had been guarding squeaked open and Doc wriggled out. Luka and Ahim followed, Ahim somehow managing to keep her skirts straight while climbing through a hole barely larger than she was.

"Now," Luka hissed, and Joe saw an actual lift descending. It stopped, level with the floor, and Sid pulled both him and Gai forward. Ahim tugged Gai's good arm over her shoulder, guiding him onto the lift, and Sid yanked Joe upright when he staggered. The lift doors closed on a corridor almost entirely free of Gormin sailors and rocketed upwards.

The sense of motion made the dizziness worse, and Joe stumbled sideways into Sid with a groan that he couldn't suppress. Pain he could handle; not knowing which way was up was pure hell. Sid kept him grounded until the lift slowed, and Joe kept his eyes fixed on the hole in Sid's jacket, which at least wasn't visibly moving. The lift coming to a halt nearly sent him to the ground again, but once it wasn't moving, he felt remarkably steady.

The bridge was as overly bright as the rest of the hallways had been, and as Joe belatedly noticed the lift had not been, light spilling through the door as it slid open. Nothing hostile came through the open doors. After a few seconds, Doc and Luka went out, cautiously, and Luka beckoned for the rest of them to follow. Gai was leaning on Ahim, but his eyes were alert and he held his borrowed weapon steadily. Joe stepped away from Sid, and gravity played no tricks on him.

"No Zangyack," Don reported unnecessarily.

Joe nodded; now that they were on the bridge, he could see that it was entirely empty. There was no Zangyack ambush, but there was also no Marvelous. He pushed down the tightening knot in his guts; just because Marvelous wasn't on the bridge didn't mean that something was wrong, but Marvelous' failure to answer the Mobilate was making it hard for him to convince himself of it. "Is the Galleon docked?" he asked; the plan had been for Marvelous to tether the Galleon to the bridge, initially.

"Present and accounted for," Don reported. "No sign of any Zangyack ships, either."

That had been Joe's second question; whether the Zangyack had been already aboard or if they'd come later. No sooner had it been answered than he was trying to reach Marvelous' Mobilate again. This time, the distinctive ring came from both the speaker in Joe's own Mobilate and from a corner, almost underneath a console. Ahim fished out the ringing Mobilate, and Joe slowly lowered his own and shut it off. Marvelous wouldn't have left his Mobilate behind of his own volition.

There was no further sign of Marvelous on the bridge; no scraps of clothing or bodily fluids, no dents or scorch marks in the walls, no signs of a fight at all. Marvelous' weapons were also nowhere to be seen, and Joe didn't know if that was comforting or not.

"We make sure the Galleon is secure," he said. "Then we find Marvelous."

No one was happy about that, but Joe needed to make sure his injured teammates were safe. Luka and Ahim accompanied him onto the Galleon, which was as empty as they'd left it. Navi was nowhere to be seen, but Joe filed that under _Problems To Be Solved Later_. A vague sense of disappointment crept over him as Joe determined that Marvelous hadn't gone over to the Galleon for some reason, either.

Convincing Gai to stay on the Galleon required verbal footwork that Joe had no talent for; it ended up being Ahim who told Gai that keeping the Galleon safe was his responsibility. From Gai's expression, he knew perfectly well that she was only saying that to save face, and accepted it with ill grace. Joe tried the same on Sid, whose limp hadn't improved during the Galleon reconnaissance trip. Most of the hearing had returned to Joe's right ear, at least, which he felt was more than enough reason for him to ignore the fact that his left ear still felt stuffed with cotton.

"I'm coming with you," Sid said. "You're going to need all the help you can get."

"I'm not trying to sideline you," Joe said, frustrated, although that was exactly what he was trying to do. He wanted Sid on the Galleon, safe, where the Zangyack couldn't take him away again. That staying out of any sort of confrontation ran counter to Sid's nature was irrelevant, at least until they'd gotten away from this nightmare of a freighter and blown it to smithereens.

"Yes, you are." Sid was implacable, if calm. "If any part of this is going to work, Joe, you need to use the resources you have. That includes me."

Joe could see the rest of his crew over Sid's shoulder, studiously pretending not to pay attention to the no doubt at least partially audible conversation. Doc was running some sort of check on Gai, and Luka and Ahim were nominally watching, but they kept glancing over toward Joe. "I don't think you can keep up," Joe said, bluntly. "I know you're trying to hide another injury."

"Straight to the point, as always," Sid said. The fact that he'd shifted most of his weight off the injured leg was not lost on Joe. "I'm not going to slow you down."

"Please, Sid." There were more words that wanted to tumble out, and Joe snapped his mouth shut before he could tell Sid how badly it had hurt when he'd died. "Please stay here."

Sid blinked, the tension draining out of his posture, and he made an aborted movement toward Joe. "Okay," he said, finally. "You want me to make sure no one comes aboard, right?"

"Yes," Joe said, and was surprised to find moisture spilling down one cheek. He rubbed his eyes, hastily, averting his face from everyone.

"I'm not going anywhere," Sid said. "So, me and the kid from – where, now? Earth? We'll stay here. The rest of you go find your captain."

"You, Gai, and Doc," Joe said. "I need him to keep an eye on ship's systems. And on Gai."

"Gai's going to need actual medical attention, sooner rather than later," Sid said. "I don't count, and I don't think Doc there does either. How do you not have a trained medic on your team?"

Joe blinked, and then shrugged. "It never came up?" he offered, although his memory threw several instances in which having someone with more than basic first aid training would have been useful at him.

"Right." Sid snorted a laugh. "Go find your captain, Joe."

Doc argued much less about being told to stay behind; something about wanting to make sure the Galleon's systems hadn't been compromised and also search for Navi. Sid took up a guard position on the Galleon's top deck, making it perfectly clear that he wasn't about to go anywhere until Joe and the others returned. Joe waved, just slightly, as they returned to the freighter.

The three of them went in wearing armor, this time; they knew there was at least one Dogormin bodyguard waiting, and an unknown number of Gormin sailors. Transforming aboard the Galleon shouldn't affect the freighter, Doc thought. The familiar blue gave Joe a sense of steadiness as they re-entered the freighter's airlock, although it felt weirdly like something was missing. He checked for his weapons, but they were present and accounted for, and he pushed the feeling aside.

The airlock hissed open.

Despite Joe's expectations, the airlock was not full of Gormin sailors. He led the other two through it, trying to maintain some modicum of stealth. Then again, given the bright yellow, pink, and blue of their various suits, stealth was more or less off the table. The bridge was still bright and empty, Marvelous not hiding in any the few shadows. The few small rooms off to the side of the bridge were empty as well, if just as brightly lit.

The lift sat as they'd left it, door propped wide open. Joe ignored it entirely; there was the confidence that came with wearing armor that made them all more resistant to injury, and then there was blatant stupidity. He opted to avoid the latter, particularly when Luka found the hatch to a maintenance tunnel or an air vent or something that led them downwards without being a giant red flag for the hunting Zangyack.

Narrow maintenance tunnels notwithstanding, the bright lights were starting to bother Joe. He distinctly remembered the lighting being poor when they'd first boarded. There had been spaces completely without illumination, and he knew the corridors had been partially lit at best. At some point, the freighter had flipped a switch from _dim_ to _a star's corona_ , and he wasn't sure exactly when it had happened.

"Second level," Ahim whispered from behind him, and Joe eyed the access hatch. There was no way of telling if there were Zangyack behind it without alerting said Zangyack to their presence if they were there.

The clear solution was to roll out, metaphorical guns blazing, as soon as the hatch slid open enough for him to fit. Joe fetched up against the far wall of the corridor, in a crouch, Gokai Gun aimed at precisely nothing. Behind him was also nothing, which made him feel slightly ridiculous. Ridiculous, he thought, was still better than dead.

Ahim exited with much more dignity, followed by Luka's enthusiastic boots on the corridor floor. "How many?" Joe asked.

"Four, including the bridge," Ahim returned, which meant another three decks' worth of rooms and corridors to search. Joe was beginning to hate this freighter with every fiber of his being.

The first of the three decks turned up empty rooms with no purpose that Joe could see or wanted to expend mental energy on figuring out. He almost wanted to run into a Gormin patrol, just so he could ask it what it had done with Marvelous.

The second deck granted him his wish, with the first hint that the Gormin had found them being the staff that skated across Joe's chest and sent him half a step backwards. He grinned behind the visor of his helmet and returned the favor. The single Gormin went down, but there was a corridor's worth of its comrades behind it.

Joe barely saw Luka and Ahim exchanging weapons before the sound of Ahim's pistols rang in his one good ear and he joined Luka in rushing forward. The narrow confines of the corridor worked to their advantage; the Gormin couldn't surround them, as long as they could hold their ground, and Ahim was a good enough shot to thin the herd from behind them. Joe appreciated her marksmanship almost as much as he appreciated not being hit with friendly fire every time a Gormin flinched back without being struck by a Gokai Sabre.

The supply of Gormin ran out, after a while, and Joe thought they'd managed to handle the squad until he saw that they were just falling back to allow a trio of Dogormin to advance. His first thought was that the surviving member of the pair that had been hunting them earlier should have had the decency to approach them on its own to avenge its partner, and his second was pain as all three Dogormin fired their lances simultaneously and he didn't dodge quite fast enough.

Blood trickled over his tongue from where he'd bitten it when he fell. Joe swallowed instinctively as he stood; the only chance they had was to rush the three Dogormin. There was no way they were used to fighting as a trio, and if they could take advantage of the odd man out, they might have a shot. The plan seemed to be working, up until the remaining two Dogormin stepped over the body of the third in unison and Joe realized that removing metaphorical odd man out had only given them a pair of Dogormin perfectly suited to working together. Ahim was on his left, Luka on his right, and the three of them fell slowly back as the pair of Dogormin advanced.

"Ready?" Joe asked, and felt rather than heard an affirmative from both of his teammates.

Before they could move to attack, both Dogormin stiffened and fell, the resulting explosion knocking the armor right off of Joe but somehow not cracking the hull of the freighter. Blinking smoke out of his eyes, Joe looked to Luka and Ahim. Luka gave him a shaky smile and Ahim nodded that she was all right, and the three of them turned their attention to whoever was standing behind the burning remnants of the Dogormin bodyguards.

"Did you miss me?" The words, drawled out in a familiarly sharp voice, sent a frisson of relief crackling through Joe's chest. Marvelous stepped forward, his Gokai Gun spinning on one hand and his Sabre propped up over his other shoulder.

"Marvelous!" Joe couldn't say anything else. His captain stepped forward, boots crunching the ash of the Dogormin into the deck.

"You don't happen to have my Mobilate?" Marvelous asked, holstering the Gokai Gun, and Joe couldn't answer. His throat seemed to have closed itself off.

Luka produced it with a flourish, and Marvelous all but snatched it out of her hands. It took him several seconds to acknowledge Luka's almost-irate "Where have you _been_?"

"I ran into a little trouble," Marvelous said finally, swinging the Sabre down. He stuck the point in the deck and leaned on it nonchalantly, but Joe could see the bloodstains in his white shirt. The coat hid a lot, but not everything. "Nothing I couldn't handle." His gaze sharpened. "Where are the others?"

"On the Galleon," Joe finally got out. "Gai's hurt," he added, and Marvelous' gaze sharpened even more.

"How badly?"

"We should find a hospital," Ahim said tactfully, and Marvelous' lips thinned.

"Everyone back to the Galleon," he said.

The lift wasn't working, which meant yet another ladder. Vertigo slid through Joe as he stepped out onto the first rung, and Marvelous' face tightened even more.

"I'm fine," Joe said, trying to reassure him. Marvelous did not look placated, and Joe couldn't blame him. From Marvelous' point of view, an attempted rescue had led them all into a Zangyack trap and gotten multiple crew members hurt with no tangible gain to show for it. Then again, maybe cleaning up a Zangyack patrol unit was enough of a tangible gain in Marvelous' eyes.

"Then climb," Marvelous said. He'd insisted on going last, and Joe knew he wasn't going to win that argument. Making it would have insulted Marvelous, so Joe hadn't even tried. Instead, he tried to keep a wary eye on both Luka and Ahim above him and Marvelous below, and the tightness in his chest didn't loosen until they'd all reached the top deck and the airlock.

"Didn't we plan a cascade failure?" Luka asked, and from the glint in his eyes, Marvelous got it immediately.

The four of them stood as far apart as the airlock allowed, and initiated the Gokai Change. Disappointingly, nothing happened. The lights continued to shine overly brightly, and the freighter showed precisely zero signs of premature explosion.

"Cannons," Marvelous said, after several anti-climactically quiet moments. "We have cannons."

"Before we –" Joe started, and Marvelous' head swung around to face him. It was a little eerie, seeing the helmet's visor and not being able to read Marvelous' expression. Joe pressed ahead. "There's someone on board the Galleon I think you should meet."

"Who did you bring on board my ship?" Marvelous asked, and Joe was suddenly glad he couldn't see Marvelous' face.

"I found Sid," he said, trying and failing to keep the note of pleading out of his voice. "He was – he was hooked up to some sort of machine." Joe's voice cracked halfway through, but he pushed the words out. "I couldn't leave him in there."

"You found Sid," Marvelous said flatly.

Joe nodded.

"And then you left him on my ship, with an injured crewmate," Marvelous continued.

"He's hurt, too," Joe said. "I couldn't let him come back out here. I just got him back, Marvelous."

"Everyone back to the Galleon," Marvelous said, and Joe remembered that Ahim and Luka were right there in the airlock with them.

Sid was exactly where Joe had left him, on the deck. He stood to attention when Marvelous swung on board, looking straight ahead. "Captain," he said.

Marvelous stalked around him, eerily reminiscent of the motions Luka had been making only a few hours before, but where Luka's predatory movements had had a playful edge, Marvelous looked nothing but dangerous. He circled Sid once, looking him up and down, gaze lingering on the drying stain on Sid's jacket. "Sid Bamick," he said.

"Yes, sir." Sid was acting as though Marvelous was his superior officer, and Joe didn't think Marvelous was going to react well to that. "Formerly Zangyack Special Forces, current status, uh, unknown."

"You were Barizorg," Marvelous said.

"So Sid tells me, sir."

"Knock that off." There was a definite growl in Marvelous' voice. "I'm not your commanding officer, so you can just stow it."

"Yes, uh, okay." Sid's posture didn't change, no matter what he said verbally.

"Joe found you in a machine." Marvelous had apparently decided that Sid wasn't an immediate threat; he let the transformation go and waved Ahim and Luka inside with a "Don't forget the cannons!" He waved at Joe to go inside as well, but Joe was having none of it.

"He did."

"What sort of machine?" Marvelous' question was underscored by the roar of the Galleon's cannons firing round after round into the freighter. As the Galleon slowly drifted away from the wreck, it exploded into a briefly flashing fireball and then crumpled in on itself.

"Um." Sid looked nonplussed, a first since the conversation with Marvelous had started. "It was a virtual reality simulator, I think. I thought… I thought the Empire had – it doesn't matter what it showed me. Joe pulled me out of it."

"A simulator," Marvelous said flatly, skepticism pouring off him in waves. "You were in this –" he waved a hand dismissively "- this simulator for who knows how long, just waiting for Joe to stumble across you, while the Zangyack went to all the trouble of making a copy of your mind and putting it into Barizorg. Why? Why wouldn't they just use you to begin with?"

"I can't really – I'm not privy to the command decisions," Sid said. "I was a soldier. I just went where I was told. But I can speculate," he added, when Marvelous opened his mouth again. Marvelous gestured for him to continue. "If my skills were valuable enough to copy onto the cyborg, Barizorg, it's possible that they wanted to be able to recreate it in case the first one was destroyed."

Marvelous looked thoughtful. "I see. And yet, when Joe killed Barizorg, we didn't get another one."

"Marvelous," Joe said, and Marvelous looked at him as though he hadn't realized Joe was still there. "We killed Zaien," Joe said. "It's possible that no one else could have done what he did."

"So why not just let Sid die?" Marvelous eyed the two of them. "Drain on resources to keep him alive and locked in a dream."

Sid shrugged. "I have no idea," he said. "I'm glad they didn't, but I have no idea what their end game was."

"Uh huh." Marvelous looked him up and down once more, slowly. "Well, come on, then, we're jumping to light speed in a few seconds, and it won't be pretty out here when we do."

Joe blinked; how could Marvelous even tell, he thought. Sid limped through the door after Joe, and Marvelous pulled it shut behind them.

"You can engage the engines," Marvelous called, and Joe felt the ship leap out of normal space. He followed Marvelous into the common area, where Gai was sprawled shirtless across half the couch while Ahim fussed over his side. Luka and Doc were nowhere to be seen, and Joe assumed they were on the bridge. Luka emerged from one of the doors leading to that direction a few minutes later and nodded.

"Doc's steering us toward the nearest G.U.P. outpost," she said. Marvelous made a face. Luka steamrolled right over it before any matching words could be said. "They have medical facilities," she said. "Which we need right now."

"Fine." Marvelous flung himself into his customary chair, trying to pretend he wasn't sulking.

"How long?" Joe asked.

Luka shrugged. "Depends on how much speed Doc can get out of the engines," she said. "He wants to give the Galleon a full overhaul, or at least the electric components. He still thinks something was sabotaged."

"Joe, a word." Marvelous bounded to his feet again and made for the stairs. Joe followed, Sid taking a hesitant step after them. "Not you," Marvelous said. "You stay here. All of you, stay here." He paused. "Where's the bird?"

"Navi's, uh, we found him on the bridge, but he's out of order," Luka said. "Doc's working on him, too."

"Is Doc the only one around here who does anything?" Marvelous asked, but he didn't seem to be looking for an answer. "Joe. Come on."

Marvelous led him to one of the corridors in the lower sections of the ship, below the living quarters, but above the storage for the rest of the mecha, when it transformed. He leaned against a wall, arms crossed, one foot planted firmly on the ground and one resting on the wall behind him.

"So," he said. "Your friend."

"Yes," Joe said.

"Seems awfully convenient," Marvelous said. "For him to show up like that, out of nowhere."

"Sometimes luck works for us," Joe said.

"Do you think…" Marvelous hesitated for a moment, which was so unlike him that Joe wanted to say anything at all to make it stop. "Do you think he's still human?" Marvelous asked. "That this is his original body?"

Joe hadn't considered that possibility. "He bleeds," he offered, although that wasn't entirely proof. "We can have the G.U.P. run a full check on him, see if anything turns up."

"Yeah," Marvelous said. "We'll do that." He paused again, chewing at a thumbnail. Something had really rattled him, and Joe didn't think it was that a former friend had appeared out of the blue. "Was the Empire really capable of subconscious brainwashing?" he asked, finally.

"You mean, is he a sleeper agent?" Joe hadn't considered that either. "I think," he said, after a moment, "that those were just rumors. Everything the Zangyack did to brainwash their subjects was out in the open. They didn't try to hide what they were doing."

"No need for it," Marvelous agreed. "And we weren't enough on their radar, then."

"No," Joe said. "No, we weren't." Creating Sid as a sleeper agent would have been far too high a commitment of resources for far too little a reward, when Sid had first been reprogrammed – no, copied. Whatever was bothering Marvelous was still there, and Joe frowned at him. "Spit it out," he said.

"What?" Marvelous yanked his thumb away from his mouth. "You're still mine," he said, but the words lacked conviction. "Even if he's come back. You're still mine."

Joe leaned forward and kissed him lightly. "Sid coming back doesn't mean I'm not yours," he said.

"Good." Marvelous pinned him to the wall in one smooth movement, his face full of something Joe later identified as relief, and demonstrated exactly what he thought of that sentiment. Eventually, he pulled away, smug, and Joe leaned into him.

"I have to talk to you about Sid," he said into Marvelous' shoulder, and Marvelous froze.

"I told you," he said carefully, "that you could bring your own crew on board when you joined. Is that what you want with Sid?"

"It used to be," Joe said, straightening. He was too close to the wall to back away far enough. "But now, I don't know."

"Joe," Marvelous said, searching his face. "If you want your own crew, that's fine." He paused. "Of course, they'd also have to be my crew. You might want to have a talk with him."

"He already kissed me," Joe blurted out. "I didn't stop him."

Marvelous sighed. "Stop waffling and go figure out what you want so you can come back and tell me," he said, with an air of infinite patience, as if he'd repeated the same thing over, and over. Come to think of it, he'd made the same offer to each of them when they'd come aboard. The man was unreal.

"However it works out, I'm still – I'm still part of your crew," Joe said, hating that he wanted the reassurance enough to ask for it, but unable not to.

"Joe Gibken," Marvelous said. "You're mine until the minute you tell me no." He peeled Joe off the wall and shoved him toward the stairs. "And now we have other things to take care of."

The rest of the crew and Sid were perched in an uncomfortable silence when Marvelous and Joe re-emerged; Ahim had made tea at some point and Gai had put his shirt back on, but as far as Joe could tell, Luka hadn't actually moved away from the console at any point. Doc was fiddling with Navi, and was the only one not to look up at the sound of footsteps.

Joe laid a hand on Sid's shoulder. "Everything's fine," he said quietly.

"You know he doesn't get a Mobilate," Marvelous said, spinning on one heel and pointing at Sid.

"You don't _have_ another Mobilate," Joe said.

"Hn." Marvelous looked at them both for a long moment, and Joe felt Sid start to squirm just slightly, although his face remained impassive. Marvelous grinned, and turned his attention to Doc. "Are we there yet?"

"We should be coming up on the outpost in a few minutes," Doc said. "I called ahead. Gavan's not there, but they're expecting us."

"That's too bad," Marvelous said, and he actually sounded if he meant it. "I would have liked to catch up with the old man. Show off the new prize."

"Prize?" Sid said, stumbling over the word, until he realized Marvelous was poking fun at him. "I'll show you prize," he said.

Marvelous laughed. "I can see why Joe likes you," he said. "Don't think you're getting out of going to medical, though, if you're where Joe learned that little trick."

"You're one to talk," Joe retorted.

"I actually heal quickly," Marvelous said, loftily. "Unlike some people I could name."

"You also stabbed your Gokai Sabre through your own foot, just to make a point," Joe said.

Marvelous wiggled the foot in question, which had healed cleanly and without lasting aftereffects. "And look at it now."

"Might I suggest the captain also undergo an examination," Sid said, absolutely deadpan. "You're bleeding again. Under the jacket."

"Dammit." Marvelous looked down and pulled his coat aside to reveal a fresh stain slowly spreading over his white shirt. "You've got good eyes," he said with grudging respect.

"Ah, no," Sid said, and gestured to Joe. "It's on his shirt."

"I think I like him," Marvelous said, leaning forward. "Can he cook, too?"

"He can't even boil water," Joe said blandly.

Sid shrugged apologetically. "I can bake," he offered. "But so can Joe, and he's better at it."

"Bah." Marvelous twisted to stare out the window, just in time for the G.U.P. outpost to come into view. "Okay, everyone off. Everyone. I let you lot out of my sight for five minutes, and I come back to broken bones and concussions."

"But I'm –" Luka started.

"Everyone," Marvelous said, staring her down.

Joe hid a smile. Even if the freighter had been a bust in terms of its crew or cargo, he was deeply glad they'd found it; it had given him a chance at more happiness than he would have thought possible, and he wasn't going to let that go.


	7. What's Behind the Door?

Ahim folded her hands at her waist and turned to look at Luka. Her partner was nowhere to be seen. More irritated than worried, Ahim called her name.

"In here," Luka said, but Ahim couldn't tell exactly where she was. "I'm, uh, I'm kind of stuck."

Ahim sighed. "Keep talking, please," she said. "I'm not sure exactly where you are."

"Okay," Luka said, and then was quiet for a full thirty seconds before she started singing one of Ahim's favorite songs, just slightly off-key. Ahim laughed quietly, because of the many things she loved about Luka, the woman's singing voice was both high on the list and objectively terrible. She would, however, never ever tell Luka that she knew how far off-key she could sing. This particular song was one that Luka had practiced, over and over again, and it still wasn't quite right, but Ahim loved hearing it anyway.

"Keep singing," she said, just as quietly, and started down the hall. Luka had gotten quite far before Ahim had noticed she was gone; she was in a small room off the engineering main hub when Ahim finally found her.

"Hi," Luka said, waving her left hand. She was standing in the middle of the room, which looked like it was an officer's workspace. There was a second door opposite the door into the room, along with a console and a chair that was inexplicably bolted to the floor. What had appeared to be two opaque walls at right angles from the outside, facing an intersection, turned out to be darkened one-way glass.

"Stuck?" Ahim said, because Luka appeared to be no such thing. Luka sheepishly brought her right hand out from behind her back, where it was firmly caught in a solid metallic manacle. There was a chain spooling from the manacle back into the wall, where Ahim could now see was some sort of a cabinet or safe. "Really?" she said.

Luka shrugged. "We're supposed to find anything valuable," she said. "This looked like a good spot to try."

"Of course it did," Ahim sighed. Luka did not have the good grace to look abashed; instead, she was glaring at Ahim as though Ahim had accused her of doing something foolish. "Can you get it off?"

"I said stuck, didn't I?" Luka said, and then rubbed her forehead with both hands. The chain clinked as she moved. "I'm sorry, I don't know why I've been so annoyed at everything lately."

"I haven't been as calm as I could have been, either," said Ahim. "None of us have."

"That seems weird, right?" Luka said. "I don't expect not to argue with anyone ever, but things haven't been this bad since before you came on board."

"It does," Ahim said. "But now that you and I agree that something is wrong, we can address the issue at a more appropriate time."

Luka laughed ruefully. "See, I was all set to get mad at you for ignoring me," she said. "Which is stupid, because this time you're right."

"This time?" Ahim said, with a smile to take the sting out of the words.

"Don't let it go to your head," Luka said. "So." She held up the manacle. "Got a hairpin in there?"

"Please," Ahim said. "We both know you have a set of lock picks in your boots." She smoothed her lacy mauve skirts over her knees. "Of course, so do I."

"I, uh." Luka actually looked embarrassed. "I left them behind. Accidentally."

"Luka," Ahim said, reprovingly.

"It's not my fault," Luka said, and then shook her head. "No, it's – I was just so ready to be off the Galleon that I completely forgot."

"Well, this is what a backup is for," Ahim said, and pulled the rudimentary lock picking kit out of her own right boot. After being locked up one too many times, and following Luka around for the better part of two years, she'd taken to carrying it around. It hadn't helped her in far too many situations, but it might get Luka free now.

After a few moments, Ahim had to admit defeat. The lock, as far as she could tell, had some not entirely physical components. She didn't know if the trip was electronic or magnetic in nature, but she didn't think she could get it open. "Did you check the desk?" she asked, leaning back.

"Of course I checked the desk," Luka said. The chain was long enough to let her move throughout the room but not out the door through which Ahim had come. "There's nothing in the desk. Give me that."

While Luka tried to get the shackle off her own wrist, Ahim searched the room for something resembling a key. There was nothing in the desk, except a second shackle, open and on the floor.

"The desk might be booby trapped, too," Luka said, several minutes too late. Ahim had already found the trap Luka had sprung.

"I see it," Ahim said.

"No, I mean, there might be another one. This asshole was seriously paranoid." Luka frowned at the shackle. "This is ridiculous."

"Would the sabre work on it?" Ahim asked, leaning on the desk.

"Do you think calling the sabres from the Galleon would have the same effect on the electronics as transforming?" Luka countered.

"Oh, damn," Ahim said, coming to the same conclusion. "It might be worth it, though," she said.

"Let's try everything else first," Luka said.

The shackle resisted all of their attempts to remove it, and even a pry bar couldn't get the other end free from the wall. Ahim couldn't even figure out how far into the wall the other end was; it vanished through a panel she couldn't pry off, after opening the safe for the second time and avoiding the second shackle.

"I told you," Luka said, when Ahim jumped back just barely in time to avoid being manacled. At least the traps didn't seem to reset. "This is such bullshit."

"I would not disagree," Ahim said.

"Okay, try the sabre," Luka said, after the two of them stared at the manacle for a few minutes. "Because the only other thing I can think of is to cut off my hand, and I feel like that's not something I want to do."

"Understood." Ahim reached for the sabre, only to have her fingers grasp nothing but empty air. "What?"

"Well?" Luka demanded.

"I'm trying," Ahim said. "I can't get through."

Luka frowned, and reached, only to also come up empty handed. "What about the guns?" she asked, and came up with the Gokai Gun in her left hand. "The hell?"

Ahim reached for her own gun, feeling its familiar weight drop into her hands. "That's odd," she said. "Why should we be able to call one and not the other?"

"Annoying is what it is," Luka said. "Okay, maybe we can just, I don't know, shoot the chain in half." She wrapped the chain around the back of the chair to stretch it as taut as it would go. "You wanna pull the trigger, or shall I?"

"It's your wrist," Ahim said, taking up a stand behind Luka. It was best not to be around the front of the gun, while it was being aimed or fired, in Ahim's opinion.

"Cheers," Luka said. She had to aim at sort of an angle rather than straight on, and that turned out to be the most ridiculous piece of luck either of them had had in a very long time.

The bullet ricocheted right off the chain, yanking the chair out of the floor and pulling a startled Luka along with it. Only the fact that most of the kinetic energy had been absorbed by the chair saved her from a broken wrist, and luck sent the bullet into the wall instead of one of them.

"Fuck!" Luka swore, moving her wrist gingerly.

"Is it all right?" Ahim asked, but Luka's fingers were all moving purposefully, and she looked more angry than in pain.

"Fine," Luka said. "What the hell is this thing made of?"

The chain was dented, but not broken. More importantly, the lights had begun to flicker. Ahim looked around, cautiously, wary that this could be the start of the so-called cascade failure that Doc had warned them all about. Nothing changed except for the lights, though, which eventually settled down into a sort of partial twilight. It wasn't too dim to make out details, just noticeably darker than it had been. As if to spite Ahim's assessment of the situation, one of the bulbs flickered fitfully.

"Great." Luka sighed, and then inspected the chain more closely. "Hey, this link is almost broken." Ahim crouched next to her; the link was bent out of shape, but not enough to pull any of the chain free. It refused to bend under either of their hands. "I bet one more shot would do it," Luka added.

"Why don't I find a crowbar instead?" Ahim said, standing and brushing off her skirts. "I don't like how that ricocheted, and I don't like what the lights are doing."

"Paranoid," Luka said, but there was a note of affection in her voice. "Hurry back," she said.

Ahim had the distinct feeling that if she took too long, Luka would just try to use the gun on the chain again. "You know I will," she said, and without knowing why, she shivered. "Keep the door closed and locked until I come back," she said.

"That's really paranoid," Luka said. "There's no one alive here."

"Probably not," Ahim agreed. "But I would appreciate it if you humored me." She kissed Luka lightly on the mouth, just a quick brush of the lips and yet more intimate physical contact than she'd had with any of her crewmates for weeks.

"Fine," Luka grumbled. Her hand had ended up tightly grasping Ahim's waist, and she only let go slowly. "I missed that," she said.

"Me too," Ahim admitted. "But one problem at a time." Seeing a gleam in Luka's eyes, she continued without missing a beat. "If we're going to have you tied up, I prefer to have the key before we start."

"Oh, fine." Luka pretended to pout. "I'll lock the door," she said, when Ahim hesitated. "I have the Gokai Gun. You're not going far."

"Of course I'm not going far." Ahim inspected the door. It was a sliding door, like nearly every one she'd seen on the freighter, but there was a mechanical lock on the inside. "Right here," she said, pointing it out.

"I have eyes," Luka said tartly. "I know how locks work. The sooner you go, the sooner you're going to come back."

Ahim still couldn't shake the feeling that something else was going to go horribly wrong, but she nodded and left. She waited outside the one-way glass, knowing Luka could see her, until she heard the bolt slide home.

* * *

Luka was bored. There wasn't much more in the office for her to explore, although she had discovered that the second door led to a tiny bathroom. The sink didn't work, but the frictionless toilet apparently did, as she tested it by pouring in a little water from her pack. "Well, that's handy," she said.

There were no further booby traps in the desk or in the safe, although there was also nothing particularly interesting in either. Luka tried to pick the lock again, giving up after it became perfectly clear that it would not open with purely mechanical input. She checked the safe for a magnet or something that might generate an electrical current, but she didn't find anything she thought she could reliably use without also accidentally electrocuting herself.

"Why are you so boring?" she asked the absent occupant of the office. "And why would you booby trap an empty safe? It's ridiculous." She looked at the safe again, on the off chance that perhaps there would be something tiny and valuable that she'd missed the first time around.

Her questing fingers found an irregularity that turned out to be a tiny pendant. It was small enough that she hadn't seen it, and wedged far enough back that if she hadn't been bored enough to make a painstaking search, she wouldn't have found it. It looked oddly familiar, and after a moment she recognized its shape as a cross-section of a Ranger Key.

"What the hell," she said, and pulled out her Mobilate. The pendant lined up perfectly. She considered slipping it in there, just to test it, and then decided against it. Now was not the time, here was not the place, but as soon as they got back to the Galleon, she was going to have Doc take a look. She put the pendant in an inner pocket, where it would be safe, and the Mobilate back where it belonged.

Ahim still wasn't back. Luka sighed deeply, and set about trying to disassemble the sink for anything potentially crowbar-like. Unfortunately for Luka's peace of mind, the sink resisted disassembly. She did manage to unscrew several lengths of sturdy piping from behind an easily detachable bulkhead, but nothing of any use in breaking the chain holding her to the wall.

"What kind of engineer doesn't keep tools around?" she demanded of the empty office.

Predictably, it did not give her an answer. Luka poked and prodded at the walls, in case she'd missed something, and found nothing but offensively bland bulkheads. She strongly felt that they could at least be some color other than an indeterminate blend of beige and gray, like everything else on the freighter. She was rapidly beginning to feel active dislike for the freighter, and the red of her pack on the floor was both the most visually appealing part of the room and painful in its contrast to the deliberately vicious blandness of the floor.

The oppressive silence was broken by the distinct sound of someone's Gokai Gun firing several shots, muffled as though some distance away. There was a pause, and then more gunfire. There was another single shot, and then silence. Luka swallowed down Ahim's name; her crewmate couldn't hear her from this distance, and listened for something, anything else. All she heard was the barely-audible hum of the reactor.

"I'm coming for you," Luka muttered. She examined the broken link, which was just barely not broken enough. She tugged on it experimentally, but all that did was hurt her hands. If she had just the tiniest bit of leverage, she was sure she could widen the gap enough to slide the broken link free. She tried the edge of the desk, but she wasn't sure if she'd managed to infinitesimally widen the gap or if her hands were just slippery with sweat. She was just setting it up to try again when movement in the corridor caught her eye.

The dark glass was clear enough from the inside that Luka could see that the humanoid figure moving across the hall was not, in fact, Ahim. It was none of her crewmates. She couldn't quite make out the details, but it looked wrong. It moved in a shuffling gait, listing to one side as if ill or injured, but steadily enough to belie any debilitation. Luka held her breath as it walked past the office without any sign of noticing either her or the door, suddenly both deeply grateful that Ahim had made her lock the door and intensely worried for the other woman.

A tinkling crash from somewhere past the office rang through the silence, and Luka identified it as part of the walkway falling. She dismissed the sound, but whoever – or whatever – was walking past the office stiffened and then started to lope toward the source of the noise. Within moments, it was followed by several more humanoids with the same awkward gait, all moving with purpose toward the sound.

Luka was suddenly morbidly certain that Ahim had located the missing crew of the ship, and that whatever had happened to them had been no accident. She pushed the useless thought away and focused on what she knew for certain – Ahim was missing, and the freighter's crew was attracted to noise. She had her hand on her Mobilate, but she couldn't send a message to Ahim if the noise was going to bring more of the creatures down on her.

Luka cursed. She turned off the sound on her own Mobilate, pushing it back into her pocket as quietly as she could. The almost broken link on the chain attaching her to the wall was her next priority; she wasn't going to die chained up like a dog, not Luka Millfy.

The base of the bolted-down chair had a sharp edge neither she nor Ahim had noticed the first time around. The broken link just barely reached it, and Luka wedged the chain down onto the base as far as it would go; if she could hammer it down farther, she was sure it would open enough for her to slip free. Her gun would serve as a mallet, while her pack had a thermal blanket that she hoped would muffle the sound enough. Still trying not to make noise, and checking the one-way windows for movement, Luka pulled the blanket slowly out of the bag.

No freighter crew members were moving in her field of vision, and Luka tried not to think about how sturdy the one-way glass might or might not have been as she carefully wrapped the butt of the Gokai Gun. She took a deep breath, hoped for luck, and pounded downwards.

Muffling the sound also dispersed the force; it took Luka several tries to warp the link, and her heart was in her mouth after every blow. Nothing showed up in the windows, though. Once she knew the opening in the broken link was wide enough, Luka found a new problem. The chain was now stuck on the base of the chair, and it resisted her initial efforts to pull it free.

"Are you fucking kidding me?" she whispered at it. Her hands were shaking, and she stopped to breathe. The thermal blanket went back in her pack, neatly folded, while her Gokai Gun went firmly into her belt. A holster would have been nice, she thought absently, but she was fairly sure that she wasn't about to lose it. Her pack once again closed and firmly strapped to her back, Luka stepped over the chain to get a better angle and yanked as hard as she could.

The chain came free and Luka stumbled backwards. She caught herself on the back wall – not a window – with a thud that was far too audible for her liking, but she still saw no movement in the corridor. She glanced up and down, just to be sure, but all she saw was the ship. Luka went back to the chain, finding that the broken link had twisted enough that she could work herself free.

Luka was left with over a meter of finely constructed chain still dangling from her wrist, ready to give her away with its metallic clinking or – worse – provide some enterprising monster with a ready-made leash. She glared at it for a moment and finally settled for wrapping it around her wrist until she ran out. The end wound around the offending shackle until she could tuck the end where she was fairly sure it wouldn't slip free.

"Wait," she muttered, and went back into the tiny bathroom. The longest length of pipe she'd managed to liberate, perhaps a meter, seemed much less sturdy when she was contemplating using it as a bludgeon, but it was going to have to do. She took a deep breath and fixed a mental image of which direction she'd seen Ahim take. She was fairly sure she knew which corridor her crewmate had gone down. Luka took a deep breath and stepped up next to the windows, peering as far down as she could.

The window over the desk, next to the door, looked out toward the engine manifold, and Luka could see irregular shapes in the shadows. She couldn't tell whether they were broken pieces of fallen catwalk or motionless freighter crew members, but they were far enough away to give her at least a head start. She turned left, to the window looking out on the corridor.

The corridor still looked empty, but it curved gently in both directions and Luka could only see a relatively small portion of it. The freighter crew members had come from the left, which was perhaps not so coincidentally the direction Ahim had gone. Luka twisted her hands on her length of pipe.

 _If transforming into Gokai Yellow has the possibility to cause a cascade failure that might destabilize the engine core, is this enough of an emergency to consider it?_ She didn't have time to think about it, not if Ahim was in trouble. She could always transform later. Moving as silently as she knew how, with years of practice under her metaphorical belt, Luka unlocked the door and slid it open.

The shapes she hadn't been able to identify were freighter crew members, standing around the manifold. Luka tried to keep her back to the wall, trying to watch both where she was going and the freighter crew's unnaturally still forms. She got to the corridor without seeing them move, and slipped around the corner.

The corridor was still empty, and Luka began to move a little more quickly. She ran into the first freighter crewman at the next intersection, while she was trying to figure out which direction Ahim might have gone. It shuffled into view, going halfway past her before turning and lunging. Luka stumbled backwards, swinging her pipe almost wildly. It hit the crewman's shoulder and bounced off, but the creature staggered sideways. It was still reaching for her, still coming, and she swung again.

This time Luka aimed at its head, and the creature's skull caved in. It crumpled to the deck, grayish ooze leaking out of its ruined head. Luka looked around to see if the noise of their brief tussle had brought any more, but she was still alone. The creature's skin was pale and leathery, and Luka had no idea if that was its normal color or a manifestation with whatever was wrong with it. Its hands were oddly pointed, and with a queasy lurch, Luka realized that its bones were sticking out of the ends of its fingers.

"So gross," she whispered. Something metallic glinted under the skin now sliding off of its broken skull, but she had no desire to look further. Still holding her pipe tightly, Luka picked a corridor and started walking again. _Ahim would have gone in a straight line_ , she thought, _so she would be able to get back as quickly as possible._

At least, Luka hoped Ahim would have done what she herself would have done. She flattened herself in a recessed doorway as she caught movement down another intersection. Three of the creatures shambled past, and at some point she'd stopped thinking of them as actual thinking beings inside her head. One of them was missing an arm, and whatever clothing they might have had was hanging off of them in rags.

Luka held her breath, but they turned down her corridor and started to walk past the little alcove that was utterly inadequate for hiding anyone. She hugged the wall as tightly as she could and waited for the first one to walk past. Lunging out of the door, Luka swung the still-gooey pipe at one of the creatures' heads. It folded without a sound and she dodged backwards just before the second would have grabbed her with its bone-tipped hands.

Her dodge put her directly in the path of the third. Luka ducked and rolled, forgetting that she was wearing a backpack and angling sideways at the last moment. She kicked the creature just below its knee as she went, and felt its leg snap. It fell far too close to her as she scrambled to both get back on her feet and keep hold of her pipe. The second one grabbed for her again, and Luka could feel its fingers brushing through her hair as she swung the pipe around again.

The second creature went down, goo leaking from its ears, and Luka felt the third grab her ankle. It pulled itself forward, mouth opening as if to bite her, and she slammed her other heel down on its head. The bone felt like mush as it gave way, and the creature went limp. Luka stamped on its wrist until its fingers released her ankle, and planted her back firmly against a wall.

The entire struggle had been eerily silent, the thump of the pipe against wet flesh and Luka's harsh breathing the loudest noises. She looked up and down the corridors again, and decided that she couldn't blindly stumble around. She had to risk calling Ahim, whether or not her crewmate had figured out that noise drew the creatures, and then the two of them had to collect everyone else and get off the freighter. The corridor, however, was the wrong place to be standing while she made noise.

Luka moved quietly down the hall, looking for a door that could be easily opened. There weren't many in this particular corridor, and she had to go farther than she wanted. Pipe in hand, Luka pushed the control that had reliably opened doors for them so far while glancing over her shoulder to make sure she wasn't about to be ambushed from behind.

Looking down the corridor meant that the hand grabbing for the straps over Luka's shoulders took her entirely by surprise. She brought the pipe around in front of her purely by reflex, feeling the wet crunch as it broke the creature's arm, but it didn't relinquish its grip. It simply pulled harder with the other arm, teeth snapping. Luka threw herself backwards, frantically beating at the creature with the pipe. It wasn't until it let go that she saw the rest of them.


	8. Dead Flesh Walking

Ahim breathed slowly and quietly, peering through the crack in the wall. Gray feet marched past her, although marched implied some sort of purpose, and she wasn't sure these animals had any. She had been startled, when she'd opened yet another nondescript door to find an odd tableau of humanoids inside.

They'd been standing in loose groups, perhaps two dozen of them, and Ahim had had a split second of thinking that they'd found the freighter crew alive, and that Marvelous was going to be so disappointed in not being able to loot the ship. The group had turned its head to the open door in one coordinated gesture, and Ahim had cautiously backed up. They'd moved toward her without a sound, shambling as though the signals between brain and limbs were ever so slightly scrambled, and Ahim had backed up further.

Ahim had hit the wall on the opposite side of the corridor just as the first of the freighter's personnel had stepped into the light, and she'd revised her discovery from _freighter crew found alive_ to _freighter crew found animate_. "We're here to rescue you," she'd said, surreptitiously pulling the Gokai Gun from her jacket pocket. The freighter personnel hadn't so much as batted an eyelash, although Ahim wasn't entirely certain that they could. She was unfamiliar with the particular species, but she didn't think they met any definition of the word healthy. She was also willing to compromise on her definition of them as alive.

Several of the freighter personnel had spilled into the corridor between Ahim and the direction from which she'd come, and she had edged the other way as they just kept moving toward her in a semi-cohesive group. "My name is Ahim de Famille," she'd said. "I'm here on the Gokai Galleon. We are prepared to render aid."

The freighter crew member closest to her had snapped its jaws in Ahim's general direction, and she'd had enough. She had fired two warning shots at their feet, but instead of backing off, they'd moved faster. Ahim had quickened her pace, trusting that none of the animals were behind her, and fired straight into the crowd. Each shot had found a mark, but the only animal that had dropped was the one that was shot in the head. Ahim had fired again, testing the theory, and more animals had poured out of the door she'd opened.

Ahim had turned and run, ducking down as many side corridors as she could keep track of until she had found a narrow access hatch. She'd hesitated for a long moment, but if the animals were inside the walls, then they were well and truly doomed. She'd pried open the access hatch and made a quick check before squeezing into the narrow maintenance tunnel and pulling the hatch mostly closed behind her.

The gray figures vanished, and Ahim let out the breath she'd been holding. She wriggled carefully out of her pack, which was more trouble than it was worth. It could be replaced; in fact, there were spares on the Galleon. She tucked two water bottles into her jacket pockets and kept hold of the Gokai Gun. If noise drew the creatures, she was going to have to make her way back to Luka silently, and hope that Luka had had the good sense to stay put.

Ahim wondered briefly if the animals could climb stairs or figure out how to work the lifts, and hoped for neither before remembering that there were potentially navigable piles of scrap surrounding the engine manifolds. Not knowing how far the next access hatch to the next level was or where it might be, Ahim picked a direction, remembered it, and started making her way through the walls.

The plan to move up one deck and get closer to where she'd left Luka before going back down was scrapped when Ahim heard the distinct sound of the Gokai Gun, firing multiple times. If it wasn't Luka, then someone else was about to get a very rude surprise. She could see the edge of where the tunnel would let out into an intersection only a few feet ahead, and she hurried toward it. She opened it a crack, noting to her chagrin that there were multiple animals in the corridor already.

The sound of Luka's gun was already starting to become more erratic. Ahim kicked the hatch off and started running, held back for a brief but terrifying second by her skirt catching on the edge of the bulkhead. She tore it free, shooting the nearest animal in the head and hoping she was headed in the right direction.

Only the animals' lack of speed let her get clear of them at all, but they were relentless. The second she slowed down, they were going to be all over her. Ahim shot behind her, once, twice, then three times, not stopping to see if she'd actually hit anything, and then the lack of gunfire other than her own struck her.

"Luka!" Ahim shouted, not knowing if Luka was even close enough to hear or if it had just been a peculiarity of acoustics that sent the sound of the Gokai Gun echoing through the corridors.

Something grabbed her from behind, and Ahim swung her pistol around. She barely managed not to pull the trigger when Luka's face registered. "Be quiet!" Luka hissed, and all but unceremoniously dragged her down the hall. A door held half-open by a pack wedged in its frame was a few meters away, and Luka pushed Ahim through it. Ahim barely caught the ladder on the side, nearly falling down the vertical shaft. "Up, go!" Luka said, and Ahim started climbing. Questions could wait.

Luka was right behind her, tugging the pack with her. The door didn't quite close all the way, having gotten misaligned, and Luka cursed. She made as if to go back to pull it shut, but a leathery gray arm reached through, and Luka cursed again.

"Keep going!" She spoke in a low voice that barely reached Ahim's ears, not a whisper. Ahim kept climbing, pausing when she reached a door that indicated the next deck. Luka waved impatiently at her to keep going, not satisfied until they'd put two decks between them and the roaming horde now swarming the engines.

Following instructions, Ahim hit the release for the door from above, using the toe of her boot while Luka aimed the Gokai Gun at the opening. The door hissed halfway open and then stopped, the sound horrifyingly loud in the quiet access shaft. Nothing came through it, and after several heart-stopping moments, Luka leaned forward. She pulled herself onto the deck, vanishing through the doorway, and Ahim found herself following once again. She pushed the door as closed as she could get it once back on solid ground.

"What the fuck were those?" Luka asked, still in the low voice that wouldn't carry more than a few centimeters.

Ahim shrugged. "I think it used to be the crew."

"Do you…" Luka licked her lips. "Do you think they're still alive?" she asked.

Ahim considered. It was a valid question; the Empire had access to all sorts of technology that it had collected while staking out its claim across the galaxy, and some of it was rumored to be able to do terrible things. "It's hard to say," she said.

"There's tech in their brains," Luka said, wiggling her fingers in the general vicinity of her head.

"I would ask how you knew," Ahim said. "But I suspect I have a very good idea."

"Bashed their heads in," Luka agreed. "We should get out of the open, and then we should warn everybody else, just in case those things aren't limited to the engine section."

"Gai and Doc are on the same level decks we're supposed to check," Ahim said, a chill settling over her. The engines were in what was arbitrarily designated the rear of the ship, generally, and the cargo holds in front; this particular freighter had vacuum-locked cargo holds on its lowest decks as well, but no one was supposed to be in those.

"And Joe's supposed to be right above us," Luka finished. "If those things figure out how to climb ladders, or stairs, we're – we're going to have a lot more trouble."

"What if they're randomly scattered through the ship?" Ahim asked, and Luka's face paled. "It's how I'd do it," she added. "If I were setting up an ambush."

"You think this is an ambush, and not spectacularly bad luck?" Luka started walking toward the rear of the ship, until Ahim caught her by the elbow and pointed her in the proper direction. Luka nodded thanks.

"The way those things were clustered in one specific room?" Ahim said.

"Uh, more than one," Luka said. "I found a room full, too. They were waiting right by the door, the assholes."

"They were ready for you?" Ahim asked.

"Yours weren't?"

Ahim shook her head. "They were scattered throughout the room, like they were waiting for something."

"Great, we've woken them all up." Luka kicked moodily at the floor without breaking stride. "With our luck, they're all networked together."

Ahim tilted her head to the side, considering. Mechanical telepathy wasn't something that she'd ever seen, or even heard of, but that didn't mean it wasn't entirely impossible. If the higher functions of the brain had been completely overridden, that didn't mean there couldn't be some sort of wireless signal linking all of the animals together.

"I was kidding," Luka said. "Don't make that face. I don't like that face."

"It's not impossible?" Ahim said. Luka looked as if she'd bitten into something sour, and also as if she might be considering trying to kick Ahim in the ankle.

"So how do we know if they're behind a door?" Luka asked. "Knock and see if they answer?"

"Not quite," Ahim said, and rounded a corner, and then another. After several moments, she found what she was looking for; the smooth opaqueness that she had come to figure out was one-way glass. She walked up to it, cupping her hands around her eyes and peering inside.

As Ahim had hoped, blocking out the light made it possible to see at least the vague outlines of the room. Unfortunately, the vague outlines of that particular room appeared to contain several humanoid shapes, all of which started moving toward the window.

"Not there," she said. "Let's move faster."

The other gamble she'd made was that the animals wouldn't have figured out how to climb up the broken walkways; they were only a few turns away from the engine manifolds. That hope was dashed when they saw movement at the end of the hall that was definitely not one of their teammates. Ahim froze, Luka mimicking her without prompting, and for a few seconds, she thought it hadn't noticed them and would just keep going.

That hope was dashed when the animal started toward them, first uncertainly and then with definite purpose. Luka pulled Ahim down a side hallway and started running as soon as they were out of sight. "How did you bash their heads in?" Ahim asked. Luka's boots were, for the most part, suspiciously clean.

"I took a length of plumbing out of the bathroom," Luka said. "Then I lost it."

"Ah." Ahim filed that away as _not useful right at the moment_. Luka tore around a second corner and through an arched doorway. The hallway was a dead end, leading them into a wide and long room full of benches and what looked like workstations on long counters.

"Perfect," Luka said, and vanished behind one of the countertops, motioning for Ahim to join her.

Ahim did, crouching low as Luka examined the underside of each counter they carefully crept past, and listening for the sound of footsteps in the hallway. The animals didn't make a lot of noise, but she would get some warning if she were lucky. A gap in the counter let her see the door, and Ahim held still, keeping an eye on it. Luka gestured impatiently at her, Ahim pointed to her eyes and then in the direction of the door. Luka nodded and moved off, almost perfectly silent despite still carrying her awkward pack.

The noise of metal on metal nearly made Ahim leap through the ceiling, and she swallowed her heart back down to where it belonged. She glanced behind her, but she couldn't see what Luka was doing. Looking back at the door, she saw a shadow approaching, and felt an irrational flare of hope that it would be one of their crewmates. It moved irregularly, though, and she knew before it came solidly into view that it was one of the animals.

"They're here," she said, pitching her voice low.

"I'm ready," said Luka, and stood up with a sturdy piece of metal in hand.

The animal didn't have a chance; Ahim distracted it and Luka crushed the back of its head on her first try. Ahim dodged the slime that spattered in an arc, brushing her skirts down. "Is that the only one?" she asked.

"I'm not going back there to find out," Luka said, and pointed to the ceiling. "I don't know what they were doing in here, but that's wide enough for both of us to fit."

Ahim looked down at the animal, and then crouched next to it, taking care to keep her skirts clean.

"What are you doing?" Luka asked. "We should go, like, now."

Ahim held up a hand in a _wait a moment_ gesture, examining the animal. She hadn't had a good chance to do so earlier, and she wasn't going to miss out now. The base species for the creature was humanoid, one of the first systems conquered by the Zangyack during their rise to power so many years ago. She'd read that they had been slaughtered in the first recorded instance of Zangyack genocide, although there were stories that some few of them had escaped to become the first race truly at home in space.

The stories were apocryphal, and irrelevant. Ahim peered at the animal's half-decomposed hands, and at its leathery pale skin. It might have passed for more or less human in the way that so many species in the galaxy did, had it looked less dead, except for the sharply pointed upper teeth. Clumps of colorless hair clung to what was left of its skull, and Ahim found herself pitying it.

Looking closer, she could see the glint of metal under its scalp, although she couldn't tell whether it had been in the brain or just inserted into the skin, or whether there was circuitry or simple structural reinforcement. The ease with which Luka had shattered the animal's skull suggested the former. She reached out, carefully, not wanting to touch it but curious as to what exactly had been implanted.

"Now, Ahim," Luka said, and Ahim stood.

"We should destroy this vessel," she said, and then allowed Luka to herd her into the ceiling. Luka pulled the hatch closed just as another shadow appeared in the door, and both of them watched through the slits betraying the location of the vent as three more of the animals wandered into the mass workstation. None of them appeared to pay attention to their prone comrade.

One circled the room, pausing where Luka had pried the support bar loose. It made a strange barking cough, repeating it three times, and the other two animals paused. One of them lurched over to the first; the second looked as though it was doing the same, but instead of moving in a more or less straight line, it started walking in circles. Ahim frowned.

The two animals still moving with purpose circled the room once and then left. Ahim watched carefully, noting that they were still moving with an uneven gait, but there was more of a sense of purpose than when she'd first seen them. _Animal_ was the wrong term for them; thing, or creature, or predator would suit them better. She looked at the thing still moving in vaguely forlorn circles.

"Be very, very quiet," she said, directly in Luka's ear. Luka frowned at her, but they backed away from the room.

The access vent led to an intersection, horizontal and vertical, and Ahim glanced up and down the shaft before motioning for Luka to follow her upwards. Luka opened her mouth, and Ahim put a shushing finger over her lips and shook her head.

Ahim climbed up one more level, glad for the access ladder and still moving as quietly as she could, but now she had no idea where on the freighter they might be. She mourned the loss of her mental map, possibly one of their best advantages, but if she could figure out where they were, she could get it back.

The ventilation shaft branched off again, and Ahim took one of the horizontal branches at random; if they were lucky, there would be an access panel at the end of it, and there wouldn't be any of the things on the other side. For once, fortune smiled on the both of them as Ahim dropped silently into what looked like a maintenance closet. Luka scrambled out after her, still holding her pack.

"Well?" Luka demanded, acceptably quiet, and shrugging her pack back over her shoulders.

"Did it look like they were communicating to you?" Ahim asked.

"Um." Luka thought about it. "Hard to say," she said finally.

"Either they're waking up and things are getting worse, or we were incredibly lucky," Ahim said. The thing that had been left behind was either glitched or it had been deliberately left looking vulnerable as a trap; Ahim didn't want to think about how their chances for either survival or finding their crewmates would drop if the latter were the case.

"So we need to warn everyone else," Luka said, and then paused. "Have you been checking in with the Galleon?"

Ahim frowned. "No," she said, and checked the time. They'd not only missed multiple nonverbal check-ins, they'd also missed the six-hour verbal check-in mark, and no one had tried to contact them.

"I turned off the sound," Luka said, doubtfully, as though they had somehow missed their crewmates trying to contact them without the cheerful ringtone and the Mobilate was simply declining to inform them of a missed call.

"So did I," said Ahim, examining her Mobilate. It looked like it was working perfectly well. She tried Marvelous first, while Luka tried to contact Joe. Neither man answered, and the trying-to-connect ring had a strange echoing quality that made Ahim think of being down a narrow echoing shaft that would only send any signal right back to its point of origin.

Luka eventually gave up, disconnecting the Mobilate and shaking her head. Ahim did the same, a hollow feeling spreading through her gut. "Try Doc," she said, and dialed Gai's GokaiCellular with the vague hope that whatever was affecting the Mobilates wouldn't prevent her from connecting with Gai's different device, and the stronger hope that the problem was with the Mobilates and not her crewmates.

The Mobilate didn't even pretend to ring, just disconnected almost as soon as Ahim dialed the GokaiCellular. She tried again, although she didn't think it would do any good. Her Mobilate made a sad little staticky noise and disconnected again. "No good," she said for Luka's benefit. Luka listened to her Mobilate try to connect to Doc's for several more seconds before stabbing the disconnect button with more force than was strictly necessary.

"Try mine," Ahim said, just to see what would happen. Luka looked at her oddly, and then shrugged.

"Okay," she said, and Ahim could hear the ring of attempted connection from the speaker in Luka's Mobilate while her own remained stubbornly inert. She held it up, and Luka frowned.

"This complicates matters somewhat," Ahim said, and Luka just barely swallowed a laugh. "Do you know where we are?" she asked, and Luka shook her head.

"I have no idea," she said. "Three levels up from where we were, that's all I know."

"I need a map," Ahim said.

"So we go up to the command decks," Luka said. "We should be able to find Marvelous while we're up there."

"What about Gai and Doc?" Ahim asked. Joe and Marvelous were safer than their other two teammates, simply by virtue of being farther away from the things that might or might not have been actively hunting them by this point, but that had certainly figured out how to move across decks. The cargo section was reinforced, from what Ahim remembered of the freighter's schematics, but that didn't mean the things couldn't get in.

"We could split up," Luka offered after a moment's thought. "You head for the command deck, I'll head for the cargo hold." Ahim's immediate impulse was to vehemently refuse to split up, and some of it must have come through in her expression. Luka leaned forward, putting what was supposed to be a comforting hand on Ahim. "It'll be okay," she said.

"I don't think we should separate," Ahim said, testing out the words. "We can cover more ground, but it leaves us more vulnerable."

"There's always the Gokai Change," Luka offered. "Even if it might spark a cascade failure."

Ahim regarded the Mobilate still in her hand dubiously. "I'm not sure I trust it to function properly," she said. "If more than the communication function has been disrupted, it might not be safe to transform for other reasons."

"Ugh." Luka crossed her arms and scuffed lightly at the floor. "This really is feeling more and more like a deliberate trap."

"A trap for us, or for anyone?" Ahim tapped her lip with her forefinger thoughtfully.

"Isn't that the question." Luka turned toward the door. "Either way, we can't stay in here forever. I think we should split up."

Ahim shook her head. "The risk outweighs the potential benefit," she said.

"The potential benefit is someone's life," Luka argued.

"The risk is no less," Ahim countered. "And splitting up never leads to anything good."

"You've been letting Gai show you too many horror movies," Luka said. "Fine. We stay together. Up or forward?"

"We have to focus on trying to find Doc and Gai," Ahim said. "Wouldn't you agree? They're in the most danger."

"I hate it when you're right," Luka said. "And when you're reasonable about it. Fine. We aim for the cargo hold. Do we know where it is?"

"You know that we do not," Ahim said, coloring her voice with mild reproof. She tried to remember what direction they'd gone from the workstation, but it was no use. Her sense of direction had been thoroughly confused.

"Then we haven't left square one," Luka said. "The only direction we're sure of is up."

"Marvelous and Joe are safer where they are," Ahim said again. "I can find the cargo holds."

"Fine." Luka exhaled, brushing the hair out of her eyes, and eyed her pack. "Think we can leave this here?"

"Bring the water," Ahim said. "And we should eat something while we can." She hadn't realized that she was actually hungry, until they'd had a quiet moment.

"Right." Luka rummaged through the pack, still keeping the noise to a minimum, and handed Ahim a meal bar. "Not up to our usual standards."

"It could be worse," Ahim said, and accepted a water bottle as well. The meal bar tasted like sawdust, even though she knew needed to eat. Luka was making a similar face at her own, and Ahim smiled.

"What?" Luka asked around a mouthful.

"These are terrible," Ahim said. "Terrible and tasteless."

"How long do you think they've been in storage?" Luka asked, turning the wrapper around as if there might be a meaningful expiration date on it.

"Knowing Doc? Since before he joined the crew, perhaps." That made the bar even less appetizing than before, but it made Luka smile.

"Oh, probably." Luka stared at it. "Do I remember buying these? I might remember buying these." She grinned wickedly. "It was definitely before you joined up."

"Please. Stop." Ahim swallowed the last of the bar, feeling better than she had since opening the first door to a room full of monsters, and drank half the water bottle.

"Or maybe it _was_ before Doc joined," Luka said, still grinning. Then she grimaced at the last corner of her own bar and popped it in her mouth. "Nope, I don't want to think about it."

"Do they grow mold?" Ahim asked innocently, and Luka glared.

"Great. We're going to be poisoned by our own emergency rations, if we don't get killed by a horde of dubiously living networked creatures that might or might not be actively hunting us down. What a fantastic day this is turning out to be."

The fragile moment of good humor was broken; Ahim looked away, her smile fading.

"I'm sorry," Luka said, and reached out to touch her on the upper arm. Ahim turned into the touch, and Luka enfolded her in what might have been a comforting hug under any other circumstances. It felt a little too much like a last embrace before hurtling into probable death, though, and Ahim pulled back after only a moment. "Hey, I'm gonna look after you," Luka said, and that wasn't what Ahim had been after in the least.

"Or I'll look after you," she said.

"I'm the one with the stick," Luka pointed out.

Ahim frowned, looking around the closet they'd temporarily holed up in to see if anything inside it looked like it would make a solid weapon that wouldn't call more of the creatures running. Then again, if they were all networked together, noise might not make much of a difference. Unfortunately for her peace of mind, the closet was full of boxes too small to hold anything useful, and all of the shelving was built into the walls. "Useless," she murmured.

"Oh, I don't know about that."

"I meant everything in here," Ahim said tartly.

"Ah." Luka glanced around, reaching the same conclusion Ahim had in much less time. "Won't be the first time we've looked at long odds."

"Very true," Ahim said, and glanced up at the trapdoor in the ceiling. They'd closed it firmly behind them, but had it shifted slightly or was that just her imagination? "We should get going."

"What if they're in the hall?" Luka tightened her grasp on her makeshift club. "Stay behind me."

Ahim sighed. "If they're clustered in the hall, using the Gokai Guns won't make any difference. It doesn't matter who goes first."

"Stay behind me," Luka reiterated, and Ahim let it go. That wasn't a fight she was going to win.

"After you, milady," she said, gesturing toward the door. Luka shot her a hard look and palmed the door release.

The corridor was less full of creatures than Ahim had expected, which was to say it was completely empty. The lighting didn't help her nerves any, as it was no brighter than it had been in the storage closet. Luka edged out first, and Ahim let her. Luka pointed first one direction and then the other with her left hand, and Ahim carefully considered both before pointing to the right. It took them straight to a dead end, and Ahim could see Luka roll her eyes even in the half-light.

Five minutes wasted felt like both nothing and the straw that would break Gai's proverbial camel's back, and Ahim resisted the urge to walk faster as they retraced their steps. Luka was faring no better, if her white-knuckled grip on her metal stick was anything to go by. Ahim held her Gokai Gun in hand and tried not to wonder what would happen if it could no longer summon ammunition when its limited stock ran out.

 _Make every shot count, then_ , she thought, and gripped it tighter.

The corridor felt more cramped the farther they went, although Ahim objectively knew that wasn't the case. She stuck to Luka's heels, checking regularly behind them, and trusting to Luka to look ahead. It still seemed to take a small eternity of walking as silently as possible before she found a landmark she almost didn't recognize.

The tip of the engine manifold loomed out of the twilight ahead of them, railings that should have been surrounding the empty space long gone. Luka came to such an abrupt halt that Ahim ran right into her while searching the corridor behind them, and barely managed to muffle her squeak of surprise. Luka pointed, silently, and Ahim nodded. They'd gone almost exactly in the wrong direction, but she was more or less confident that the distinctive shape of the manifold told them how they were oriented, and that meant she knew which direction to go.

Luka did not follow when Ahim started out, and she went back, intending to pull the other woman by the arm if she had to. Luka was standing almost at the edge of the floor, in a spot Ahim did not trust not to give way, and pointing downwards. Ahim edged as close as she dared and looked. The creatures were climbing the wreckage, slowly and clumsily, but ignoring the few intact ladders. Ahim nodded, and Luka allowed herself to be pulled down a corridor.

Ahim moved more quickly now; she felt it was only a matter of time before the creatures figured out what a ladder was for, and it was anyone's guess how long it took them to learn how to open a door. That they had progressed from simply walking down a hall and attempting to tear her and Luka apart to figuring out how to climb up a broken catwalk told her that they _were_ learning, and she didn't want to see how far it could go. They were outnumbered enough.

"That's bad," Luka said, pitching her voice low enough not to carry. "Right?" Her tone begged Ahim not to confirm what they both knew.

"Yes," Ahim said.

"How far are we going?" Luka rolled her shoulders as she walked, and Ahim could see her eyes flashing.

"Far enough," Ahim said. She didn't know how big, exactly, the cargo freighter was, only that the vast majority of it was the network of hard vacuum storage, and that it was long enough that she and Luka had been dropped off at opposite ends from Gai and Doc with the vague idea that they would meet in the center rather than all of them boarding at the same location. "Hopefully not that far," she added.

Luka did not seem mollified.

Truth be told, Ahim hated this design for a cargo freighter. Once they got out of the residential area, even the corridors around the pressurized storage bays were a confusing maze of corridors and half-levels. She knew Doc had taken something to mark where they'd come from, so the two of them wouldn't end up entirely lost, but she and Luka had nothing similar.

If they were lucky enough, they'd find marks that Doc and Gai had left, and could just follow them. Ahim wondered if the creatures could do the same thing, and suddenly felt less optimistic about the entire endeavor.

"We could go right past them and never know it," Luka said, almost too quietly for Ahim to hear.

"Or the creatures could miss them entirely," Ahim said. "If it comes down to it, Final Wave is loud enough to carry."

Luka's dubious expression was not comforting.

The cargo section, at least, wasn't difficult to find, spanning the breadth of the ship as it did, and the heavy doors appeared to be intact. Ahim took a deep breath, and set to watching for approaching hostilities while Luka argued with the door. It didn't take her long to get it open, but Ahim almost expected at this point to find creatures behind every closed door, and she was concentrating so hard on listening behind her that she almost missed the creatures coming from straight ahead.

"Luka," she said, in a normal tone, because at this point it didn't matter.

"Got it," Luka said, and the door hissed open. She pulled Ahim through, backwards, and Ahim trusted her enough to move without looking where she was going. On the other side of the door, Luka slammed her palm down on a side panel, and the door slowly began to shake its way closed again. Ahim aimed her gun at the nearest creature through the gap, but not firing was one of the hardest things she'd ever had to do.

The door closed on the foremost creature's outstretched arm, its fingers dropping to the deck inside the cargo section with a disturbing rattle. Ahim let out the breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding, and then nearly screamed when an arrhythmic pounding started on the heavy door.

"Everything okay?" Luka was looking at her quizzically.

Ahim straightened her skirts. "We should get going," she said, proud that her voice remained steady.

* * *

 _Speed is the issue now, not stealth,_ Luka thought, followed by, _someone is going to end up dead because we stayed together._

The Galleon couldn't be reached, although sending out a check-in ping at any point resulted in a simple return message that the rest of the crew had already sent in their check-in, everything was fine. Luka put that issue out of her mind; it wasn't something that she could solve at all, much less from inside a haunted freighter actively trying to murder her team.

 _Doc can probably fix it_ , she thought, which was not as comforting as it should have been.

"Do you think they're in here, too?" Ahim asked.

Luka shrugged. She would have put the creatures all over the ship, if she were laying a trap. She glanced at the ceiling, and then down the nearest side corridor. "Don't open any doors," she said.

Ahim made a face at that. "I don't suppose you have a marker," she said.

Luka did not, in fact, have a marker. What she had was a hefty metal stick, and when it turned out that Ahim wanted to mark where they'd already searched, Luka solved the issue by simply knocking dents in the walls. The noise reverberated down the hall, seeming to gain volume as it echoed. Ahim gave Luka a pointed look, but Luka shrugged.

"We don't know that they're in here. If Gai and Doc hear us, hopefully they'll come investigate. And if there are creatures in here, hopefully we'll find Gai and Doc before the creatures find us."

The look on Ahim's face said that none of that was comforting, and all of it relied too heavily on luck.

"Look, if you find something else we can use to mark the walls, then go for it." Luka hefted the stick over her shoulder, and then grimaced as the drying sticky goo on the end came too close to her face for comfort. She didn't put the stick back down, though, it was a matter of pride.

A rumbling noise caught both of them off guard, as if something had exploded, followed seconds later by the decks trembling. No alarms sounded, and as far as Luka could tell, the freighter wasn't venting atmosphere. Then again, if it was, she really would have no way to know. Ahim paled at the sound, looking around as though she could tell where it had come from.

"Do you think," Luka said, and couldn't get the rest of the sentence past the lump in her throat.

"I'm sure that was one of our crewmates winning a fight," Ahim said, a little too serenely, face so still that Luka thought it might crack if Ahim moved the wrong way. She turned her head from side to side, but the noise and vibration had faded.

"I can't tell where it came from," Luka said. The thought that the explosion – if that was what it had been – had triggered a cascade failure crossed her mind, but if that was the case, there was nothing she or Ahim could do about it.

"If something had gone wrong," Ahim said, "surely there would be an alarm."

Luka wasn't sure that Ahim wasn't partially psychic. "You'd think explosions would trigger alarms, too," she pointed out. Ahim did not appear to be pleased.

The hallways seemed endless, a peculiar mix of hyperaware paranoia and boredom settling in after several minutes of encountering nothing moving except the two of them. Despite the sense of urgency Luka felt after the booming rumble, Ahim insisted on searching every alcove that wasn't behind a closed door for something that would make less noise when marking the walls, which was how Luka discovered another springloaded set of shackles.

Perhaps unreasonably paranoid about putting her hands in unfamiliar storage spaces, Luka poked the interior with the clean end of her stick first every time Ahim found one. It wasn't until the fifth or sixth that she triggered a trap mechanism and the shackles closed around the end of the stick instead of her wrist.

"Huh," was all that she said, sliding the stick out easily. She poked around the inside of the cupboard again, just in case there was another one. There wasn't.

"Apparently we didn't just have bad luck," Ahim said. "Do you suppose any of the others have run into these?"

"I hope not," Luka said. She felt around inside the storage space, coming up with precisely nothing useful; it was full of dead electronics, and then her fingers encountered a familiar shape. She pulled out an exact duplicate of the pendant she'd found when she'd been trapped near the engines.

"What's that?" Ahim asked, peering over her shoulder.

"I found another one," Luka said. She couldn't remember if she'd told Ahim about the first one or not. Going by Ahim's puzzled expression, she suspected the answer was _or not_. "It looks like it would slot into the Mobilate," she said. "There was one in the safe where I got, um, stuck before." She pulled it out of her pocket, to demonsrate.

"That's very odd," Ahim said.

"I'm not putting it into the Mobilate now," Luka said, before Ahim could suggest that she do no such thing. "But we should look at it when we get back to the Galleon."

"I agree." Ahim tilted her head to the side. "Would you like to hold both of them?"

"I, uh, yeah." Luka stuffed them both in her pocket, and prodded at the chain with the end of her stick. "Does this seem like a trap set specifically for us?"

Ahim considered for a moment. "I don't know," she said finally. "But we should get moving again."

"Yeah, yeah." Luka stood up straight. "Find anything helpful?"

Ahim shook her head no, and started rapidly walking down the corridor. Luka jogged to catch up, after denting the wall to show where they'd been. "You're enjoying that far too much," Ahim said, a trace of amusement in her voice.

"Girl's gotta break something once in a while," Luka said.

Ahim snorted softly, but didn't say anything.

Luka dented walls across three decks' worth of cargo storage before they reached an airlock warning the crew that they were about to enter hard-vacuum cargo holds. She glanced up at the ceiling again; either they'd missed Gai and Doc entirely, or they'd gone down when they should have gone up. She supposed it amounted to the same thing. "Hey," she said, but Ahim wasn't standing behind her.

Luka had a moment of panic before she saw Ahim standing several meters away looking at a wall. "Luka," she said. "I know where we are."

"We know exactly where we are," Luka said. "What we don't know is where anyone else is."

"No," Ahim said. "This is functional." She stabbed at the wall with more force than necessary, and Luka finally looked at it. There was a display, faded and flickering, but which clearly showed a three dimensional schematic of the freighter. It also displayed a dot that theoretically demonstrated to the viewer where on the schematic they were.

"Can you get it to tell us where anyone else is?" Luka asked.

"No," Ahim said after a long moment. "But there is a pattern."

"What, now?" Luka leaned forward. Ahim traced her hand across the diagram.

"See how the corridors branch out?"

Luka hadn't noticed, or hadn't been able to put together a specific pattern across the three decks they'd searched. Now that Ahim was pointing it out, it seemed obvious. "Yeah," she said. "I also notice we've gotten all the way forward."

"This should make searching go a little more quickly," Ahim said. Luka wasn't convinced on that score.

"Three decks down, eight to go," she said. "Do you think dumping the creatures into the vacuum holds would slow them down?" she added, almost idly.

"Why, do you have a plan?" Ahim asked.

"Not a plan, exactly," Luka hedged. "Look, let's find Gai and Doc first."

Ahim took the lead, as they left the corridors near the airlock, counting on her fingers periodically as they moved upwards. There was more access to each half-level at this point, which Luka interpreted as more directions from which stray creatures could approach. Ahim didn't seem to be playing lookout at all, which meant it was up to Luka to spot anything coming.

The anything, when it finally showed up, seemed to be less mobile than it had initially appeared. The writhing mass on the floor looked like nothing so much as a mechanical tentacle, but at least it didn't appear to be capable of squirming down the corridor on its own.

"What," Luka said, as they approached it. It was stuck to the floor with surprisingly strong metallic threads, and refused to budge when she nudged it with her boot.

"It does not bear a resemblance to our previous encounters," Ahim said. "Of any sort," she added.

"Yeah, I've never seen anything quite like it either," Luka agreed. She crouched down to get a closer look. It was integrated into the floor, somehow, and she couldn't shake the feeling that it was cannibalizing the floor for spare parts, or at least spare material. She examined her boot to see if any of it had stuck, but her boot looked clean. "Does it look like it broke off something bigger to you?"

"It does," Ahim said.

"Wonderful. Now we have a giant squid to – I am never going to hear the end of it if there really is a kraken," Luka said.

"I believe this means Gai and Doc were somewhere in the general vicinity," Ahim said. There were dents in the surrounding walls that led Luka to agree, although there were no bullet holes. It was possible that neither Gai nor Doc had managed to acquire the Gokai Guns, she supposed.

"Or they weren't involved in this at all," Luka said, and pointed out the lack of perforation in the surrounding scenery. "Yeah, I'm not sure I like that option either."

There were scorch marks with the same type of thread dangling from them as connected the tentacle to the floor, and Luka pointed them out. Ahim frowned, looking back and forth. "Perhaps we should follow the trail," she said.

"I can't help but feel that following the octopus is a mistake," Luka muttered, but they didn't have much of a better plan. She wanted to say something about it at least not being the creatures, but that felt like it would be inviting trouble. "Lead on," she said instead.

The trail led to evidence of a fight, smashed walls and doors, and pieces of the bulkhead simply missing as though they'd been ripped away. A hole going down at least three decks, rubble at the bottom dripping some kind of fluid, was the centerpiece of the destruction. Luka kicked at one of the broken bulkheads. It crumbled under her foot, and a half-staircase hanging precariously over the gap tumbled downwards. It missed Luka by centimeters.

"Careful," Ahim said, and Luka nearly snarled at her. "Do you hear anything?" Ahim asked.

Luka listened carefully before shaking her head. They'd found the most likely location for the thundering sounds earlier, but there was no noise now that might have provided a helpful guide. "Nothing," she said. "We don't even know if this was –"

"Yes, we do." Ahim stood in front of yet another wall, hands folded demurely in front of her as she bent over to look at something more closely. Luka stepped over a hole in the floor to see what it was, and saw a scrap of silver jacket caught in the bottom of a significant dent. "Gai's jacket," Ahim said unnecessarily.

There was no further sign of their crewmates, but the fact that Luka saw no blood in evidence anywhere was heartening. She tried not to think of potential ways their crewmates could have been injured without breaking the skin as they retraced their steps back to the wriggling tentacle.

"It's gotten bigger," Ahim said as they approached it.

Luka eyed it dubiously, coming to the conclusion that Ahim was right. The tentacle had grown, if only slightly, since they'd found it the first time. "I vote we get farther away from it," she said.

"Agreed." There was a slightly hysterical note in Ahim's voice that Luka didn't like, and she caught Ahim's elbow before the other woman could get more than a few steps past the thing stuck to the floor.

"Hey," she said. "You good?"

Ahim stared at her, eyes wide before she visibly calmed herself. "I'm fine," she said, and the edge to her voice was gone. "I'm fine," she repeated, more firmly, and this time Luka almost believed her.

"Good," Luka said, giving her arm a squeeze. "Then let's get going."

Knowing where their teammates had been gave them something of a reference point; not finding any further evidence of their passage was more than a little frustrating.

Luka couldn't help dropping her eyes to her boot as they kept walking; the tentacle had looked as though it were consuming the floor, and the mental image of something stuck to her shoe eating through it to her foot below was hard to shake. It was distracting enough that she finally looked up to see that she had nearly walked into a wall and that Ahim was gone.

"Ahim!"

The wall she'd nearly walked into was the opposite end of a T-intersection, and Luka had no idea if Ahim had gone down one of the two hallways or if Luka had kept going straight while Ahim had gone around a corner. She jogged a few steps down one corridor, looking around the nearest corners, but she didn't see Ahim. She reversed course, checking the second corridor. She was about to turn back, but something glinting on the floor caught her eye.

The object on the floor was a button; specifically, it was a round peach plastic button that Luka would have staked her life on coming off of one of Doc's shirts. It was in the middle of a five-way intersection. Luka let out a long string of curses, pocketed the button, and expressed her frustration on the bulkhead of the wall she'd come from. "Ahim first," she said, and ran back the way she'd come.

The second time she smashed into the bulkheads on that specific corridor was even less satisfying than the first, but the route to where she'd found evidence of their shipmates was clearly marked. Luka re-settled her hands around the makeshift handle of her stick and stalked back toward where she might find Ahim.

A trio of the creatures found her instead, one with its jaw hanging grotesquely halfway down its neck. Luka swung, grimly, and it dropped. The other two separated, circling her. Luka turned, carefully, trying to put her back to a wall, but the creature at her feet tripped her up. She kicked it in the face, although it hadn't grabbed her so much as she'd walked into it, and the two circling her took the opportunity to rush her.

Luka swung at the creature on her left, catching it across the forearm and sweeping it to the side, but the creature on her right tackled her to the floor. She tried to roll, only partly successful and ending up trapped between her pack and the thing with snapping teeth. Desperately, Luka shoved at it, but its ankle was trapped beneath her thigh and as soon as she pushed it away it came right back.

The second creature made a grab for her other arm, and Luka screamed in what she would later swear was rage. It was drowned out by the most welcome noise she had ever heard; two precise cracks of fire coming straight out of Ahim's Gokai Gun. One of the creatures landed across her legs, and Luka kicked it off. Ahim rounded the corner the rest of the way, smoke from the gun barrel wreathing her shoulders, eyes darting back and forth down the corridor. Luka scrambled to her feet, tempted to leave the pack exactly where it was.

"Are you hurt?" Ahim asked. "Are there any more?"

"There will be," Luka said. "But this is more important."

"Are you hurt?" Ahim repeated, and Luka ground her teeth.

"No," she said. "I'm just a little bruised." She held out her arms for inspection; her jacket had protected the skin on her arms, and her habit of wearing tights under her shorts had so far kept her legs more or less intact. The tights were a lost cause though. "Ahim, I know which way they went. Sort of."

Ahim was less than impressed by the five-way intersection where Luka had found the button. "In the center?" she said.

"Just about." Luka rubbed the bridge of her nose with her cleaner hand.

Each corridor looked like the next, three going up half a level and two going down. "We've already checked below," Ahim said, and looked at the other three possibilities.

Luka shrugged, and shouted. "Gai! Doc!" She glanced at Ahim. "It's not like it's any louder than the Gokai Gun," she said. "The creatures definitely heard that."

Ahim checked the corridor behind them, and joined in the shouting. Luka picked a corridor at random and started down it, still calling for their teammates at irregular intervals. A look over her shoulder told her Ahim was still in the intersection, gesturing for her to keep going. Without going out of sight of her teammate Luka went down all three corridors to no avail, finally returning breathlessly to the intersection.

"That was less than helpful," she said.

Ahim shook her head. "We won't know what works until we try it," she said.

Luka swung her stick against the nearest bulkhead in frustration. "We could be out here for weeks and miss each other."

"Not statistically likely," Ahim said lightly, which was not as comforting as Ahim seemed to want it to be.

"Screw statistics," Luka said. "Your turn to pick a direction."

Hands folded at her waist, Ahim nodded toward the corridor Luka had just smacked. "Since you've already marked that one," she said.

"Right." Luka jogged up the half flight, Ahim right behind her, and took half a second to regret that stairs were apparently no longer an obstacle for the creatures. It was harder than she'd expected to walk away from the most recent piece of evidence she'd found that their crewmates were still alive and moving through the ship, and she gripped the makeshift club until her knuckles turned white. Out of the corner of her eye, Luka could see Ahim look down at her hands and say nothing.

"We're going to find them," Ahim said.

"I know." Luka bit her tongue on the words that wanted to follow, the vicious acid question that wanted to know whether they'd find their crewmates alive or ready for a funeral. "I know."


	9. Inanimate

The door proved to be too firmly stuck to simply push closed again in a hope of getting it back into its track, and Gai ended up just kicking it down. He looked as though he enjoyed the process far too much, particularly when it went well on only the second try and the majority of it crashed to the ground inside the room in question. Doc rolled his eyes, but only when he was sure Gai wasn't actually looking.

The flashlight beam seemed too narrow inside the room, its light eaten up by too many shadows. Gai thumped the wall, and the lights in the corridor brightened, but the lights in the room in question stayed stubbornly dark. "There should be a switch," Gai said, feeling along the wall next to the door. Doc wanted to tell him this wasn't Earth and the freighter didn't have standard manual input pads for simple commands, but then Gai pressed something with a sharp click and the lights flickered partway on. There was just enough illumination to see the vague outlines of the contents of the room, and Doc held his flashlight at the ready.

The room was full of cargo containers arranged in neat lines and stacks, like every other room they'd investigated. The main difference, aside from the door that Gai had broken down, was the damaged container in the near corner. That, and when Doc stepped over the broken door and swung his flashlight up to the doorframe, he could see that the door had been deliberately rigged to jam. "What?"

'What, what?" Gai said. "Is there anything interesting in there?"

"I'm not sure," Doc said, and moved a little farther into the room. He thought he'd seen the movement near the broken container. Gai was right behind him, lifting the broken pieces of the door and tugging them free from the frame. He left them leaning against the wall, and peered over Doc's shoulder.

"What do you mean, you're not sure?"

Doc turned to tell Gai to let him concentrate, but just as he moved, he saw something dart across the edge of his field of vision again. "Did you see that?" He swung the flashlight over to where he thought it had been, but there was nothing.

"See what?" Gai edged forward, in his version of a defensive posture. Since he was a ridiculously capable fighter, Doc wasn't about to criticize. "I don't see anything."

Doc followed, keeping a little closer to Gai than was strictly necessary. There was enough room for two in the path created by the lines of cargo containers, if one wasn't picky about personal space. Today, Doc had decided he was not particularly picky about personal space. "I thought I saw someone move. Something move."

"Someone or something?" Gai asked. "Because those are two very different things."

"I'm not sure." The flashlight dimmed in his hand, and Doc shook it. It responded by flickering, and he brought it up close to his face, trying to see what was wrong with it. Somehow the case had loosened; Doc screwed it back together, tightly, and the beam stabilized.

"That." Gai didn't say anything else, but he was tenser than the situation called for. "What's in the box?"

Doc didn't think Gai was particularly curious about what was in the box, but its contents had spilled halfway across the aisle, and the shadows seemed to dance as he brought the flashlight around. The background light made things almost worse than if it had been pitch black, and Don thought he saw something move for the third time. "There!" he said, and Gai leapt forward.

"Augh!" Gai's shriek brought Doc hard on his heels, but when he'd stumbled forward all he saw was the wide and unblinking eyes of a doll, lying on the floor.

"What?" Doc demanded, just in case it had been something else.

"It was looking at me," Gai mumbled, and then he flushed. Doc could see it even in the low light. "I, uh. I might have thought it was alive."

Doc picked up the doll; the rest of the objects in the crate turned out to be other toys, random and clearly used, amidst fluffy piles of packing material. The doll was humanoid and clearly not Zangyack, not that there were many dolls in areas controlled by the Empire. It had huge green eyes taking up the majority of its narrow face, and a dark stylized crest of feathers sweeping back from its incongruously broad forehead and halfway down its back. The body was smaller than the head called for, giving it a further sense of a stylized alteration of a proper humanoid figure.

It was dressed in dark gray, letting it blend in to the half-light, and with only its face and eyes standing out, it was easy to see why Gai had been startled. The eyes, in particular, nearly glittered in the light from the flashlight, although Doc couldn't see any reflective material.

"I wonder where it's from," he said, turning it back and forth.

"I feel like we shouldn't try to find out, and just leave it here," Gai said. "It's creepy."

Doc threw Gai an exasperated look. "It's just a doll."

"It winked at me!" Gai said, and Doc looked back at the doll. Its eyes were both wide open and fixed, as was fitting for an inanimate object. He tilted it back and forth, carefully, and saw the gravity-modulated eyelids slide up and down. It was really well-constructed; the eyelids almost looked like they were a single piece with the plastic covering the face.

"It's not winking at you," Doc said, and turned it over. There was a small button on the upper back, nearly hidden by the feather crest. He pushed it, and liquid speech spilled out of the doll. It wasn't in any dialect that Doc understood or had heard before, and it certainly wasn't part of the Zangyack Imperial official list of recognized dialects.

"What did it say?" Gai asked.

Doc shrugged. "I don't know this language." The Galleon had a translator that might be able to figure it out, if he wanted to bring the doll with them, but somehow he didn't think this is what Marvelous had meant when he'd said to find valuable things if no one was left alive on the ship. "Let's keep looking," he said, putting the doll back down.

Gai kept glancing over his shoulder as they left the room, although Doc didn't know what he expected to see, and when they got into the corridor, he made a _wait here_ gesture before collecting the broken door. Doc left him to it while he re-shouldered the red backpack that held what supplies they'd be using over the next twenty hours or so.

"What are you doing?" Doc asked, having finished adjusting the straps to find Gai still playing with the door, but Gai was clearly attempting to wedge them back into the frame. He did a fairly good job of it, although there were several gaps about which he was unhappy, by the way he was staring at them. "I think it's probably fine," Doc said.

"Uh huh," Gai replied, clearly paying less than zero attention and looking around as though there would be something else in the corridor that he could use to apparently barricade the door.

"There's no one in there," Doc said. "Come on, we're running behind schedule."

"There is no schedule," Gai said absently, and then, "Doesn't that strike you as weird?"

"Doesn't – what's weird?"

"There's no one here," Gai said, as though that were some sort of explanation.

"That's why we're still looking," Doc said carefully.

"No, I mean." Gai scrubbed a hand through his already messy hair. "There are no bodies. Where's the crew? Doesn't that seem weird? How many people does it take to run a ship like this, and shouldn't they be around here somewhere?"

"Uh." Doc paused. "A freighter of this class and size – I mean, it has less crew than you might think, because most of it is storage space, and most of that storage space is hard vacuum, which means very little maintenance."

Gai motioned impatiently. "Yeah, but there would be someone."

"Well, the Galleon runs on a crew of five, and it used to run on a crew of three. Plus Navi." Doc tapped at his lips. "Though it's a special case."

"So you wouldn't run a ship like this with five people," Gai said, and Doc wasn't sure whether or not the Earthling was being sarcastic.

"You're looking at a crew of a few hundred at least," he said. "Maybe more, depending on how many were hired at each port for loading and unloading."

"So where are they?" Gai gestured around. "Did they all leave in escape pods?"

"It probably doesn't have any," Doc said. "Smuggler-type ship like this, running around in the Mire? Off the approved Zangyack patrol routes?" He turned slowly, looking at the corridor with new eyes. "They probably cut corners wherever they could, which also probably means fewer crew. Four hundred, maybe?"

"Okay, then," Gai said.

"That doesn't mean they – four hundred people is a lot, but there's still a lot of space to cover," Doc said. "And most of them wouldn't be down here anyway. No reason to be in the cargo holds. Someone's always worried about theft."

"Of course they are," Gai said. "But it's weird, still, right."

"We still don't know what happened here," Doc said. "Marvelous might, by now, if he's gotten into the ship's logs."

"We could check in and find out," Gai said.

"Um." Doc thought about how irritable the rest of the crew had been over the past several weeks. "Or we could just wait until later and not piss off the captain."

"Is it always like this?" Gai asked, sounding as though the words had just slipped out.

"No," Doc said, without having to ask what Gai meant. "It's been rough."

"Maybe we can, I don't know, try to help Ahim play peacemaker," Gai said. "I mean." He stopped walking, and turned to face Doc. "I've said things that I didn't mean, and they weren't fair to you or to anyone else I said them to, and then I just hid up in the crow's nest instead of trying to work things out. I'm sorry." He squeezed his eyes shut, almost as if he expected violence from Doc, of all people.

Doc clapped him on the shoulder, startling him enough that Gai opened his eyes wide. "I said things I didn't mean, too." Gai's face broke out in a relieved grin at those words and he moved forward to grab Doc in an enthusiastic hug. Doc hugged him back after a minute, reveling in the physical contact that it seemed he hadn't gotten from anyone on the crew in weeks.

Gai disengaged with a friendly ruffle to Doc's hair, and Doc ducked away with a push at Gai's already retreating hand. "How many times," he said automatically, and then choked off the words. Gai was still laughing, though, and Doc joined in, relieved that he hadn't broken their newfound reconciliation.

"How long have we been down here?" Gai asked, shifting his backpack.

"Three, no, four hours," Doc said. He'd been sending hourly pings to the Galleon, which was their standard operating procedure in unknown but probably not hostile territory; the first verbal check-in was scheduled for six hours into the mission, but until then, the Galleon would alert the rest of the crew if someone's check-in was more than fifteen minutes late. Doc sent the four-hour ping and received confirmation that the rest of the team had checked in as well. "Everyone's extremely punctual today," he said. "We were the last ones again."

"Yay," Gai said. "Are you sure we have to spend a full day down here?"

"Easier than going back to an airlock and then coming back again," Doc said. The backpacks had water and meal bars for the day, as well as lightweight thermal blankets. "Think of it like a camping trip."

"This is the world's worst camping trip," Gai said. "Or the most ridiculous."

"Pretend we're walking down a river," Doc said, which prompted Gai to start telling him how camping was supposed to work. For the first time in ages, the overly enthusiastic imparting of information was endearing rather than obnoxious.

The moment was ruined when Gai suddenly stopped talking and spun around. Doc looked at him, and then turned to see what he was looking at. The corridor behind them was empty. "Did you hear that?" Gai asked, but Doc hadn't heard anything but Gai.

"No," he said. "I didn't hear anything."

Gai frowned, peering down the corridor. This section was well lit compared to the section they'd just left, and Doc couldn't see anything out of place. "I thought I –" Gai broke off again. "There, that. Did you hear that?"

This time Doc had heard a muffled noise, but it wasn't anything they hadn't heard before. The ship had been creaking around them since they'd first boarded it. "It's probably nothing," he said, but Gai was jogging back the way they'd come. "Gai!" he called, and then chased after the other man when Gai showed no signs of slowing down.

Doc caught up with Gai at the room with the door they'd broken; the door was no longer wedged in its frame but lying in the corridor outside. "Look," Gai said, pointing at it.

"So it fell out," Doc said. "We broke it."

"It wasn't going anywhere," Gai insisted. "Not after I was done with it. Something pushed it."

Doc wasn't going to ruin their newly rediscovered ability to talk without pissing each other off, even if Gai was clearly being paranoid. "From the inside?" he said, trying to sound neutral.

"It – _yes_ , from the inside." Gai was already clambering through the door, looking around. There was no way he could see clearly in the darkened storage room; Doc sighed, and climbed after him with the flashlight. Nothing appeared to have changed, but Gai went straight for the broken box. "It's gone," he said.

"What's gone?" Doc asked.

"The _doll_ ," Gai said, pointing.

Doc inched closer, shining the light across the contents of the box. He thought he'd remembered leaving the doll on the floor, but it was gone now. Maybe it had rolled somewhere when the door had fallen.

"It did it," Gai said, absolute certainty in his voice.

"What did what?" Doc asked, shining the light toward the nearby gaps. He didn't see the doll, but he wasn't terribly worried about it.

"The doll broke down the door," Gai said, a pained expression on his face as if he knew exactly how ridiculous that sounded.

"The – okay. So what if it did?" Doc said. "It's a toy. We have other things to worry about. Like trying to figure out if there are survivors. Or useful stuff."

"This ship is either haunted or cursed and we should leave," Gai said, and Doc didn't think he was joking.

"Gai," he said, and sighed. "I've never seen a cursed ship," he said instead of what he really wanted to say. "Or a haunted one. Or ghosts."

"But," Gai started.

"We have a job to do," Doc said. "Come on." Without looking to see if Gai was following, Doc left the storage room and walked purposefully back in the direction they were supposed to be going. The storage rooms they'd checked so far had been a bust, and they had found no one living, and the entire freighter was most likely a waste of time, but at least it was something tangible to do.

It only took a few seconds for Gai to jog to catch up, and he fell in next to Doc with an attempt at contrition. "Have we checked this section already?" he asked, which derailed his attempt at making peace entirely.

"I don't think so," Doc said. The corridors all looked the same, but he'd been mentally checking off where they were on what he remembered of the freighter's maps. Not that he was entirely sure that the maps had been completely accurate, what with the bits and pieces that had been missing when he'd finally managed to pull them out of the freighter's CPU.

"I swear I've seen that crack before." Gai pointed to a bulkhead that was cracked in a distinctive spiderweb pattern.

"The material might just do that," Doc said, trying not to sound annoyed. They were so close to working things out.

Gai looked at him sideways and kept his mouth shut.

"You hungry?" Doc asked after a few moments. They'd been going through the corridors for a while, and maybe a snack would help either or both of them feel less agitated; the discovery of the least private office space ever – open on three walls and no door – made for a good stopping place.

"Little bit," Gai said. "You want to take a break?" He was clearly trying to be conciliatory, and Doc went along with it.

"Yeah." Doc shrugged out of his pack and left it on the floor. There weren't chairs so much as a pair of stools on opposite sides of the desk bolted to the floor, but he'd take it. Gai followed suit, leaving his pack on the weirdly angled desk instead. Doc handed him a meal bar before Gai could open his own pack, and Gai swapped it for one of the water bottles he'd stowed in an exterior pocket.

"Thanks," Gai said, and then examined the meal bar more closely. "What is this?"

"I have no idea. It was something Luka bought before I joined the crew." Doc smiled at the look of horror on Gai's face, and then laughed out loud.

"You," Gai said, shaking a finger. "You're supposed to stop harassing the new guy eventually."

Doc shrugged, mouth full, and Gai rolled his eyes and took his own tentative bite.

"These are awful," he said, not bothering to swallow before he spoke. "Absolutely awful."

"I know." Doc tried to wash the taste out of his mouth with the water bottle, but it lingered. "It's supposed to be – no, I have no idea what that is."

"Banana," Gai said, gloomily. "And beef."

"Wherever we bought these doesn't have either of those things," Doc told him.

"Well, that's what it tastes like." Gai took another unenthusiastic bite. "I used to like beef," he added mournfully. "I don't think I'll be able to eat it again after this."

Doc wasn't sure if he was joking around or not, but they finished the rest of the snack in near-silence. Gai conscientiously folded up the wrappers and stored them in another exterior pocket, and did the same with his empty water bottle. Doc, who had just been planning on leaving his water bottle where it was, did the same as though he hadn't even considered doing anything else.

"Ready?" Gai asked, dusting his hands off against his pants.

"Almost," Doc said, and then hesitated. "I, uh. Can I ask you for something?"

"Anything," Gai said, leaning forward with a terribly earnest expression. "Almost anything," he amended, although Doc had no idea what qualifier he'd suddenly thought of.

"Can we just sit for a minute, before we start again?" Doc stopped himself from biting his lip. There wasn't any reason to be nervous around crew, and he blamed the last few weeks for it.

"Sure," Gai said, clearly surprised. "If you need a break, that's okay."

"Not just," Doc said, and stopped. "Could you maybe put your arm around me?" he asked, voice coming out small and needy.

"Doc," Gai said, something Doc couldn't identify heavy in his voice. He came around the desk, shoving his pack to the side, and climbed up to sit on it. He patted the empty space next to him. "Here."

Doc turned around and sat, leaning against Gai's shoulder. The comfortable weight of Gai's arm settled around him, and Doc sighed. Gai was less tactile than the rest of the crew, but no one had been in the mood to touch anyone else for weeks, or at least, not in the way Doc was comfortable with. "Thanks," he said, after a few seconds, and tried to pull away, but Gai resisted.

"Still okay," he said. "It's… yeah." He rubbed Doc's upper arm in what was clearly supposed to be a comforting gesture, and it was calming in a way that Doc had sorely missed. "Better?" Gai asked, after several minutes had gone by in near-total silence.

"Yeah," Doc said, sitting up straight. This time Gai's arm fell away easily, and he clapped Doc on the back with a little more force than was strictly necessary. Doc nearly pitched forward off the table, one arm flailing before he caught himself, but that was also a return to normal. "Gai," he said anyway.

"Eh, heh." Gai grinned at him, thoroughly unrepentant, and then the grin fell away. "Hey, uh, if you want, um." He paused, looking everywhere but Doc. "I mean, if you wanted to just, I don't know, I'm okay if you just want to sit, sometimes. I'm okay with that."

Doc looked at him. Gai being less tactile with the rest of the crew had a lot to do with the more or less open relationship the rest of them shared – or, as Gai put it early on, flaunted – and Gai's lack of comfort, even years into the crew, with that particular level of physical intimacy outside a monogamous relationship. Doc wondered occasionally if Gai felt that he was somehow safer than the rest of the crew, given his own lack of desire to participate in a lot of the physicality enjoyed by the others.

"I mean, if you don't want – that's fine," Gai said, starting to backpedal, and Doc had waited too long to say anything.

"Thank you," he said, softly, ducking his head. "I would like that. Sometimes."

"Okay, then." Gai beamed at him and reached over to ruffle his hair. "Seems like a silly thing not to have said anything before."

"It only took you two years," Doc said. The way Gai had reacted to finding out how the rest of them were involved with each other, he'd thought it would take at least five. "Way quicker than I thought."

"Ha," Gai said. "None of you were really what I expected, you know." He held up his hands in a placating gesture at the face Doc must have been making. "No, no, not like – I don't know what I expected, but I wouldn't trade you guys for anything."

"Even after the last couple of months?" Doc asked.

"Yeah, well." Gai scrubbed a hand through his hair. "We should get going."


	10. The Circuitous Route

There had been something odd about the doll, whether Don wanted to admit to it or not; Gai was absolutely sure he'd wedged the door closed tightly enough that it wouldn't fall out on its own. He'd felt, at the time, that it was a little bit paranoid, but now he was beginning to wonder if he hadn't been paranoid enough. He didn't want to press the subject with Don, though, as the other man was clearly on edge from the last couple of weeks. The few moments they'd sat quietly was the first time Gai had seen him relax since the Zangyack homeworld.

Eventually, though, they had to get going again, and Gai assiduously packed all of their waste into the outside pockets of his pack. Even if the ship was derelict, he wasn't going to leave trash in it. That just seemed impolite.

It was, therefore, with a definite sense of betrayal that when Gai unzipped his pack to pull out another bottle of water that he saw the huge creepy eyes of the doll staring up at him. It startled him badly enough to jump backwards, and he hit the wall hard.

"What?" Don was on his feet immediately, looking around for what it was that had startled Gai, flashlight in hand like a weapon.

"Why is this in my bag?" Gai asked, pointing.

"Why is what in your bag?" Don's pose loosened, now that there was apparently no threat, and he put down the flashlight.

"That!" Gai pointed dramatically. He hadn't put the doll in his bag, which meant that the only reasonable assumption to make was Don trying to play a prank on him.

"What?" Don said again, and this time came to look over his shoulder. He pulled the doll out, turning it over in his hands. "Why did you take this with you? I thought you didn't like it."

"Take it –" Gai sputtered. "I didn't take it. I left it there."

"Then how did it get in your bag?" Don asked, and it was his reasonable, concerned, and puzzled tone that ignited a spark of anger.

"I clearly didn't put it there," Gai said. "Why did you?"

"Why did I what?" Don asked, without breaking stride in the slightest. He was committed to the prank, Gai could acknowledge that.

"Why did you put the doll in my pack," Gai said, gritting his teeth and trying to maintain some sort of façade of being reasonable.

"I didn't!" Don protested, looking innocent and wounded and still not letting go of the charade.

"What, so it climbed in there by itself?" Gai snatched the doll from Don's hand and slammed it down on the table. It bent at the waist, head tilting back with the impact so that it looked like it was still staring at Gai. He flipped it over, face down.

"I don't – I didn't put it in your bag," Don said, but he was looking less hurt and more pissed off by the second. "That's mean, Gai."

"Mean?" Gai gaped at him.

"To make a big deal out of the doll being creepy, hide it in your bag, and then accuse me of putting it there." Don folded his arms, looking like a cross between a sulking child and an angry adult.

Gai stared, mouth open. He had absolutely no response to that, but if Don was going to take the charade this far, he didn't have to talk to him. He snapped his mouth shut, zipped his bag closed more forcefully than it probably required, and snatched the flashlight off the table before stalking off down the hallway. All of that talk about wanting to create a more positive atmosphere, trying to get everyone to get along better, wanting to be _cuddled_ , and then somehow Don thought this was a funny prank.

Gai wasn't having it.

He hadn't gotten more than a few meters down the hall before Don came running after him, still caught between puzzled and pissed off. It looked like the angry part was winning, though; he stopped jogging when he got close to Gai, and started walking down the other side of the hallway.

 _Oh, yeah, real mature_ , Gai thought resentfully. He was the youngest one on the crew, the newcomer, the one that everyone said was a baby, but Don was the one acting like a kid. Well, Gai wasn't going to call him out on it. If Don wanted to stand over there and sulk, Gai was going to let him. The standoff lasted another three and a half decks, Gai checking doors on one side of the hallway and Don checking doors on the other, before Don broached the cold silence.

"Gai," he started.

"What," Gai said, in no mood to be civil.

"I really didn't put the doll in your bag," he said.

Gai stopped walking, trying very hard not to scream. "I didn't put the doll in my bag," he said. "So unless you're telling me that the doll is alive, then we have a problem."

Don glared at him mutely, frustration oozing off of him in waves. He was a better actor than Gai had given him credit for, that was for sure, although Gai was suddenly reminded of a magazine story about Don being a great hero on his homeworld and a brief story about amnesia. Don had been a pretty good actor – _liar_ , Gai's mind supplied – then, too. Gai wasn't going to fall for it.

"If that's the way you want to be about it, fine," Don said.

"Fine." Gai kept walking, skipping the next three or four doors. Don kicked at one of them after Gai went past, and something inside kicked back. Gai froze, his annoyance temporarily forgotten. He and Don exchanged a look, and Don knocked on the door.

"Hello?"

The knocking repeated from the inside, but no voice call came back. Don knocked again, a distinctive pattern this time, and whatever was inside repeated it. A pit started to form in Gai's stomach, and he wished he had the Gokai Spear. He couldn't reach it, though, although he tried. He would rather have explained to Don that he was jumping at shadows than be without a weapon. The flashlight was going to have to do.

Gai knocked once, just in case it was some sort of fluke, and the single knock repeated from inside the room.

"Is anyone in there?" Don called again, and then said something else in no less than three different dialects. Gai assumed he was repeating the phrase, but none of them got an answer.

Gai knocked three times, just to be sure, and this time silence fell. The three knocks were not repeated, and that was somehow worse than the previous mimicry. Gai tried again, three and then two, and jumped backwards as a rapid flurry of pounding came across the door from the inside.

"There's someone in there," he muttered, unable to keep himself from stating the obvious.

"That's what it sounds like," Don said, but he was eying the door critically. "Sometimes something like this would be set up like a trap," he said in explanation, tone still cool. "The Zangyack would rig a room to make noise and then it would either be full of hostile soldiers or it would explode."

"I don't like either one of those options," Gai said. "How do we open the door from farther away?"

The answer was to go down the hallway and throw a rock at the manual release, or at least the equivalent of a rock. Gai pitched a full water bottle with unerring accuracy toward the door, and it slid obediently open and stayed that way.

Nothing exploded. No soldiers came boiling out. Nothing came out, and after a few tense minutes, Gai was ready to scream. "I'm going to go look," he said.

"I don't –" Don started.

"I don't care," Gai snapped, the tension from earlier boiling over again. Don gave him a hurt look, but he stood to follow Gai. He had the Gokai Gun in hand, which just seemed patently unfair; if Gai couldn't call his weapon from the Galleon, why could Don? Unless Don had had it to begin with, in which case Gai felt that Don should have told him that they were not, in fact, unarmed.

The door continued to sit innocently open as they crept toward it, refusing to disgorge anything living or dead or at all reminiscent of an explosion. The water bottle had rolled back toward them, and when they reached it, Don picked it up again and tossed it through the door. Nothing happened with that, either, and that just made the tension ratchet up further.

There was no light in the doorframe that Gai could see, which meant that they were opposite the door before he could actually see inside the room at all. It was no bigger than a closet, empty shelves lining the walls. No few of the shelves had fallen inwards, although whether that had been deliberate or a product of decay, Gai couldn't say. He only saw them as a half-registered background, though, because the object in the center of the floor was taking up all his attention.

The doll was sitting in the center of the floor, staring up at him with its wide unblinking eyes.

"What the hell," Gai hissed, turned on his heel, and started back toward the alcove where they'd left the doll. He didn't care that it was three decks away; this was ridiculous.

"Where are you going?" Don had grabbed his arm and was trying to pull him backwards, but Gai was stronger and determined enough that Don was just dragged along in his wake.

"I'm going to see if the doll is where I left it," Gai said. "Because if it's not there, you're playing a very elaborate prank and I am not amused."

"I didn't take the doll," Don protested, and Gai stopped suddenly enough that Don ran right into him.

"Then how did it get in there?" Don looked either guilty or confused, and at this point Gai couldn't tell the difference. He went back the way they'd come, intending to take the doll out of the closet just so he could be sure, but when he got back to the open door, it was gone. He rounded on Don. "Where is it?"

"I don't know!" Don had let go at this point, and he'd lost all signs of being anything but as pissed off as Gai was. "I didn't touch it! I didn't touch it the first time, and I didn't touch it the second time, and I don't have it now!"

"Then let me see your bag." Gai folded his arms.

Don stared at him, stung. "I can't believe you don't trust me."

"Trust you?" Gai kept his arms folded, because otherwise he was going to do something he regretted. "The – all of you people have been horrible for weeks. We get out here and the first thing you do is tell me some story about wanting to make everything better, and then you stuff a creepy doll in my bag when I'm not looking and deny it!"

"I didn't put the doll in your bag!" Don was almost close to tears, eyes glittering and lower lip just barely starting to tremble. "You – you've been part of the crew for two years! How can you not trust me?"

Gai hesitated, the words catching in his throat. Even if the past few weeks had been a nightmare, it didn't exactly erase everything the crew had been through together. Did it? It shouldn't. But he couldn't let it go, he had to see that Don wasn't taking a joke way too far. "I…" he said, but he'd waited too long.

"If you want to look, then fine," Don spat, one single tear spilling over. He angrily dashed it away and slammed his bag down on the floor. "I'll show you. Look." He yanked the zipper open and upended the bag on the floor. The contents spilled out, blanket roll and water bottle and protein bars cascading over the deck. The doll landed on top of everything, last out of the bottom of the bag. Don made a choking noise, face going pale.

Gai froze, staring at the doll, and then shouldered past Don to look inside the closet. The doll was gone, the closet empty, and it was sitting innocuously on top of the pile of Don's belongings when Gai turned around again. Don reached out, hand shaking slightly, and picked up the doll. His face twisted and he flung it down the corridor. It bounced twice, and then skidded out of sight.

"That's enough, Gai," Don said, wearing an expression Gai had only seen a few times. It was hard to get Don truly angry – he got annoyed or frustrated as much as the next crewmember, but actual anger was something that Gai had almost never see Don display. He was showing it now, face hard and furious. Gai nearly fell back a step before stiffening his legs and reminding himself that this was Don, his crewmate.

 _Crewmate who you just accused of playing a prank gone too far_ , his conscience reminded him.

"I don't know what kind of game you're playing, but it's not funny."

"I'm not-" Gai started.

"Accusing me of playing some sick joke on you, and then turning around and doing the same thing is horrible." Don stepped forward, almost aggressively. "It's not _nice_ , Gai."

The uncomfortable thought that Don had not, in fact, been playing a prank could no longer be denied. Gai felt his own rage drain away, replaced by acute shame and apprehension, as the question of who, exactly, had been moving the doll around ran circles though self-recriminations for suspecting Don, of all people, of playing a prank gone too far. "I'm sorry," he blurted out. "I should have known it wasn't you."

Don's eyes narrowed. "You're telling me you didn't put the doll in my –" He paused. "You didn't have time to," he said, some of the anger melting out of his posture. "Neither of us had time to."

"I told you it was creepy," Gai muttered, the words sliding out before he could stop them.

"Right now, I think you might not be wrong." Don gave him a look. "But we're going to talk about you accusing me of playing jokes on you after we figure out what's going on."

"Ah," Gai said. "Yes. Wait." He replayed the events of the last few hours, when and where he'd found the doll and what he and Don had been doing. "You really didn't have time," he said. "You left the room before I did, and then I barricaded the door."

"I told you," Don said, a trace of sulkiness marring his voice. "It wasn't me."

The two of them turned to look down the corridor where Don had thrown the doll, but Gai clearly remembered it rolling around a corner. "Do you want to go looking for it?" he said.

"Not even a little," Don answered, and felt around inside his pack. Apparently satisfied, he stuffed his belongings back into it, and then answered Gai's quizzical look with, "I just wanted to make sure it hadn't crawled back in there."

"I can't believe you just made it more creepy," Gai groused, but the sick feeling of anger and shame was slowly fading.

"I can't believe you thought it was –" Don shook his head. "Let's get this over with, and we'll talk about it back on the Galleon."

"Over with." Gai sighed. "I really don't think there's anything alive here."

As if on cue, a scraping noise came from the corridor where Don had thrown the doll, and Gai found himself slowly turning around for a second time. On any other day, he would have charged forward without hesitation in an attempt to kick whatever it was back to the hole it had crawled out of, but this was not a normal day. It had been a trying day, full of unearned vitriol and creepy hallways and a doll that wouldn't stop staring at him and had been following them around of its own inanimate volition.

There was nothing in the hallway to kick, but just as Gai had decided that the sound was a figment of his own imagination – and the fact that Don was also staring down the hall could be explained as a shared hallucination or Don taking his cue from his teammate, that was Gai's story and he was sticking to it – a click echoed off the walls followed by a dull thud.

"We could go the other way," Don offered.

"Discretion being the better part of valor?" Gai said, having learned that in a high school English course not nearly long enough ago. He'd hated that saying.

"Sometimes running away means victory," Don said, but he was already edging toward the hallway. His Gokai Gun was in his hand, which made Gai feel slightly better, and he looked mournfully at his flashlight. It wasn't even a heavy flashlight; it was lightweight and easy to travel with.

"Stay behind me," he said to Don anyway. Of the two of them, even essentially unarmed, he was the better combatant in close quarters.

Don threw him a look that Gai interpreted to mean as Don having the better weapon meant he should go first, so Gai carefully pushed Don behind him with his free hand. If Don tripped over an uneven part of the floor and made it that much easier for Gai to get ahead of him, that wasn't necessarily Gai's fault. The damp feeling on Gai's palms vanished as he got closer to the corner, his mind settling into the clarity that came with knowing he was about to try to beat something into the ground.

Gai rounded the corner, darting forward before he could see his opponent clearly and aiming for the element of surprise. It would have been a brilliant move, if there had been an opponent in the hallway. It was fully lit and just as empty, no lights flickering and no shadows to hide the total absence of anything hostile. There was a total absence of anything that wasn't bulkheads and deck plates, including the doll that should have rolled no more than a few centimeters out of sight.

"Nope," Gai said, the clamminess returning to his palms with a vengeance. He was absolutely unashamed to admit that he wanted nothing to do with creepy things that vanished when one wasn't looking at them. "We're going the other way now."

"Why?" There was a very slight edge of a tremor in Don's voice as he edged around the corner to see the unoccupied hallway. "Where is it?" he asked, and there was no need to define what _it_ was.

"Nowhere," Gai said. "Mass hallucination. Doesn't exist. We're going that way now." It wasn't the appropriate pirate move, and it wasn't the appropriate Super Sentai move, and he _did not care_.

"That way sounds good," Don said.

Even knowing the corridor was empty, it was still hard to turn his back on it. Gai could feel his skin crawling, the hair on the back of his neck standing up as though he were being watched. He was hyperaware of the potential for any sound coming from either the hallway behind him or his own pack, if the doll had decided to crawl inside it while he wasn't looking and he didn't care how ridiculous that sounded, even in the privacy of his own head.

"We should check for survivors on the next deck," Don said after a few minutes, suggestion dovetailing very neatly with the appearance of a set of stairs leading nearly vertically upward. It was more of a ladder than a set of stairs, to be fair, with the steps set widely apart and probably difficult for something shorter than half a meter tall to climb.

"I think we're done with this deck," Gai agreed, and went up the ladder. He was tempted to check his pack out of pure paranoia, and pushed the impulse away. He hadn't heard anything. Don hadn't seen anything. He hadn't seen anything. There was a hatch at the top of the ladder and Gai closed it. The hatch also boasted a bolt, although he wasn't sure why, since there was virtually unlimited access to the entire warren of cargo hold corridors through countless half-stairs and catwalks, but he took a vicious satisfaction in slamming the bolt home anyway.

Don was looking around the new deck space, carefully assessing it with an air of competence he rarely displayed openly. He was as capable as the rest of them, although he tended toward flailing around and was more often than not the target of carelessly flung objects, and it was at times like this that Gai was reminded that Don had lived through the same mayhem and carnage as the rest of them.

"Your bounty was too low," he said, and Don glanced over at him, did a double take, and then stared. "What?" Gai's paranoia ratcheted upwards again, and he all but tore off his pack. "Is it on me? Is it on me? What? _What_?"

"My _bounty_?" Don said.

Gai, having determined that the doll was not perched on top of his pack, mocking the both of them, attempted to put it down nonchalantly. He didn't think he'd succeeded, but he wasn't going to acknowledge that. "Well, yeah," he said. "Way too low."

Don blinked at him, nonplussed. "Did you get hit on the head when I wasn't looking?" he asked.

"I'm just saying." Gai made an abortive movement toward the zipper of his pack's main compartment, and then deliberately moved his hand away. He wasn't going to give in to paranoia. "You're way better than the Zangyack gave you credit for."

"I'm still upset that you thought I was playing a prank on you," Don said. "Flattery won't get you out of it."

Gai scrubbed his hands through his hair. "That's not what I'm trying to do. I'm just saying."

"Uh." Don blinked at him again, and Gai was almost tempted to wave a hand in front of Don's eyes or ask him if he was having a seizure. "Thank you?" Don said, finally. "I think."

"You're welcome," Gai said, feeling as though he'd lost control of a throwaway remark that wasn't supposed to generate a conversation, and hoping that would lay it to rest.

"Did you check in?" Don asked suddenly.

"Oh, damn." Gai had completely forgotten that they were supposed to send a signal to the Galleon. "How late are we?"

Don was already rapidly pecking away at the Mobilate, sending the verification code. "I think we just barely made it. I could have sworn we were late."

"Maybe – are you even wearing a watch?" Gai was, and according to his watch, they were a solid twelve minutes outside the fifteen minute check-in window.

Don shook his head. "What's yours say?"

"That we're late." Gai tapped it, but it looked like it was working just fine. "Maybe it's broken. Or fast. Or something. Did you get the confirmation message?"

Don held up the Mobilate, so that Gai could read it for himself. "Nothing's wrong. Maybe your watch got accidentally pushed forward or something."

"Or something," Gai said, but he was starting to have suspicions of other things going wrong, as if the doll and its shenanigans hadn't been enough. "I'm beginning to think this is the worst place we've ever been."

"There was the slime," Don offered. "And the eyeballs."

Gai gave him a wounded look. "Why would you remind me about the eyeballs?"

Don gestured around the corridor. "At least it's not as bad as the eyeballs, right?"

"You're tempting fate," Gai groaned. There was absolutely no way anything was going to go right, not after a remark like that. Whatever deity or great power or anything that had any control over their immediate environment was going to laugh its metaphorical head off and then proceed to make their lives a living hell. He did not relay his conclusions to Don, though, not with Don trying not to give him a deeply skeptical look.

"There's no such thing as fate," Don said, serenely.

"Ha," Gai muttered, and looked at his watch again. It seemed to be working perfectly; he'd picked it up the last time they'd swung by earth because no one else on the Galleon seemed to worry about what time it actually was at any given point. He'd picked up several, making the assumption that he was going to break at least a few, but he was still on the first one. "Don," he said.

"Hm?" Don was peering down the corridor, which was lit by precisely three lights flickering at random.

"We should try to get in touch with someone else." He was already aiming for Luka on the GokaiCellular. "This seems weird."

"Did you see something down there?" Don wasn't paying attention to him at all. Gai gave the corridor a cursory glance, but all he saw was the disorienting effect of unsynchronized flashing lights.

"No," he said, listening to the GokaiCellular ring, and ring, and ring. He tried Ahim, just in case Luka had her hands full with something, with the same result. Joe didn't answer either, and it was starting to bother Gai. He tried raising the Galleon, reasoning that Navi at the very least should be able to answer an incoming call – the Galleon had been correctly sending back their check-in pings, in theory. He couldn't raise Navi, either. "Don, no one's answering."

"There's something there," Don said, and took the flashlight.

"Don," Gai said, with more irritation than urgency, but Don was already going down the hall. Gai jogged to catch up.

The flashlight didn't help with the atmosphere, its beam cutting through twilight one moment and all but lost in the overhead lighting the second, but Gai finally saw what he thought Don was talking about. Part of the corridor had collapsed, spilling crates and containers out into the hallway, and something was moving at the base of the pile.

The beam of the flashlight, when Don maneuvered around the final broken bulkhead, illuminated a paper-white face dominated by blank gray eyes and a slowly moving mouth. It was attached to half of a body, a long-dried sticky trail leading back to the wreckage of the wall. Don shone the light across the wreckage, but there were no gaps large enough to see through into the dark beyond.

A scratching noise finally registered in Gai's ears, and he looked down to see the half-figure scrabbling at the deck plates as it if were trying to pull itself closer to them with withered bony fingers. The only word that came to mind at that moment was _zombie_ , and he would later deny that he shrieked at all.

"There's something in there," Don said, heedlessly stepping closer to the half-zombie on the deck, and Gai shoved him away from its reaching hands. "What are you doing?"

"That thing is dead," Gai said. "Look at it."

"It's moving," Don said, and then it seemed to register that not only was there a body on the floor, but that it was half a body and – having apparently dragged itself halfway across the corridor before getting stuck – it was still moving. "What is _that_?"

"Whatever that is, it's what's in there, and we are not going any closer." Gai shook his head firmly. "I've seen this before."

"You have?" All traces of apprehension dropped away and Don turned to him with curiosity and anticipation. "What is it? Where? On Earth, before you meet us? These are from Earth?"

"What? No." Gai scrubbed his hands through his hair again and guided Don back the way they'd come, keeping a wary eye on the ruins. "Okay, I technically haven't seen this in real life."

"Don't tell me you're going to go on about your movies again," Don said flatly.

"It's clearly a zombie!" Gai said, arms flung out to the side. He pointed at it. "Look! It's dead, it's moving, it was trying to grab us, and there are more in there! We're lucky it collapsed and that we didn't find it intact and open the door – oh, no."

The skeptical expression had returned to Don's face and he wasn't even trying to hide it this time. "Gai," he said. "That's ridiculous. Dead things don't get up again. They stay dead."

"Okay, what if –" Gai started, but Don was already walking back toward the thing on the floor. Gai caught him around the waist and bodily hauled him out of the corridor. Don struggled and flailed, but Gai was the master of flailing and – more importantly – could take Don down one on one nineteen times out of twenty. This was not the one out of twenty; Gai got them both out of the corridor, through an intersection, and several meters down a perpendicular corridor before he let go of Don.

"You're being ridiculous," Don said.

"I don't want to get eaten," Gai said, and flung his hands up at Don's exaggerated eye roll. "Okay, fine, so what if it wasn't actually a zombie, it's still weird."

"Maybe it was a cyborg," Don said.

Gai perked up. "You mean like Barizorg?"

"Well." Don blew out a sigh, looking over his shoulder. The corridor Gai had picked was mostly lit, the only shadows in the deeply-recessed alcoves holding doors to the various storage compartments. "A lot of the Zangyack cyborgs were based on older technology, and when the organic components, uh. Well, if there was enough of a mechanical framework, it would just keep going when the organic components, uh, were no longer viable."

It took Gai a moment to parse the sentence. "Wait." He looked at Don, then down the hallway, and then at Don again. "So. Barizorg. For example. Human brain, right?"

Don spread his hands wide. "More or less. A few other things."

"So if Joe hadn't, uh." Gai skipped over the actual words. "So Barizorg could have kept going without the human parts of him."

"Kind of." Don scrubbed his hands on his pants, as though trying to wipe off dirt that wasn't actually there. "He wouldn't have been as, uh, efficient. The civilizations that developed the technologies eventually gave up on it because the general population tended to object."

"To – what happened to the organic – did it just _die and stay there_?" Gai clenched his teeth, feeling almost physical nausea roiling in his stomach. "And the Zangyack thought this was a good idea?" He looked behind Don, but the half-thing hadn't crawled after them. "Is that what that was?"

"I was trying to figure out if that's what that was," Don said, somewhat sharply. "But someone literally dragged me away from it."

"I don't know what's worse," Gai said. "If it's a zombie, or if it's a dead cyborg."

"I told you, it's not dead," Don said, and Gai waved a dismissive hand; at this point, it was semantics.

"Undead cyborg, whatever." His eyes widened; he'd nearly forgotten entirely about the thought he'd had earlier. "Don, what if they're somewhere else on the ship."

"That would be a problem," Don said.

"Forget finding survivors from the crew or anything useful in here," Gai said, more because he felt better vocalizing it than because it needed to be said.

"We need to find the others and get out of here," Don agreed. His Mobilate was in his hand before he'd finished speaking.

"I already tried," Gai said. "Luka, Ahim, and Joe. And Navi."

"Marvelous isn't answering either," Don said, stabbing at the Mobilate as if it were at fault. "Okay. I might be able to – or maybe – or what if…" He bit his lip and looked at Gai. "The simplest thing to do would be to go up to where Marvelous was supposed to moor the Galleon, and use its systems to find the others."

"So right outside the bridge," Gai said. "Sounds like a plan to me."

Don nodded, resolute now that they had a course of action. "Then let's get going."

As if on cue, every light in the section cut out, leaving them in pitch black. Gai swallowed what might have been a squeak, biting his tongue and making a grab for Don. Don struggled against his grip for a moment, until Gai said his name.

"Gai?" he returned.

"Yeah," Gai said, feeling down Don's arm until he found his hand. Sudden paranoia that he'd grabbed something else in the dark made him say, "I've got your right hand. Right? That's you?"

The hand in question squeezed tightly. "Yeah," Don said, voice shaky with relief. "That's me."

Gai felt his knees go a little wobbly, too. "Where's the flashlight?" he asked.

"Left pocket."

After a few minutes of rustling, Gai could hear something being dragged along cloth. "Wait," he said.

"Why?" Don's voice was barely higher than a whisper; he'd mimicked Gai's tone at first, and neither of them had raised their voices. Don's question was the most noise either of them had made since the lights had gone out.

"It makes us a target," Gai said. His eyes were beginning to almost adjust to the dark. He thought he could see a dim red glow along where he knew the bulkheads met the deck, but nothing else. Moving as quietly as possible, he guided Doc toward the nearest wall. There was an alcove to his left, if he remembered correctly, but after the fiasco down the other hallway, he was wary of doors.

"Maybe," Doc said, "but we can't fight something we can't see coming."

Either the red light was getting brighter, or Gai's eyes really were adjusting to the dark. He could see the dim shape of the corridor around them now, and they were the only things moving in it. "You can't see?" he asked.

"It's dark," Don hissed. "I'm not good with – I don't see well in dim light."

"What, really?" Given that he hadn't complained once about the lighting on the ship, Gai was impressed.

"Two years and you didn't notice?" Don said, voice still low.

"I thought you just liked to be able to see all the details," Gai said, although if he thought about it, Don was the one who was always turning on the lights. Don was also the only one who hadn't had trouble with the bizarre planet revolving around a double star; the rest of them had had to wear something covering their eyes.

"Well, I can't see, at all." Don sounded sulky on the surface, but Gai could hear the nervous edge below it.

The emergency lighting – at least, he assumed it was emergency lighting – was bright enough now for Gai to make out Don's face. He switched hands, gripping Don's right hand with his left. "Follow me, okay? I can see enough to know where we're going."

Being able to hear what was coming, if anything did, was going to be their second advantage, and the sudden noise Don made scrabbling through his clothing nearly sent Gai's heart into his mouth before he figured out what it was.

"What are you doing?" he asked, once his heart was back in his chest, pounding a staccato beat against his sternum instead of his throat.

"Here," Don said, and Gai felt the unfamiliar outlines of Don's Gokai Gun in his right hand. It wasn't that he'd never fired one, but he was far more comfortable with his spear. On the other hand, he was going to take what he could get.

"Thanks," he whispered back, and started leading them away to the wall. He'd gotten a solid five meters down the hallway before it occurred to him that he had no idea where the bridge was, and then that it didn't matter, as long as they kept going up. He was feeling optimistic, despite the zombies – which he was going to continue to call zombies, no matter what Don thought they were – the dark, and the creepy doll, until he heard a distinct slithering noise coming from directly behind them.


	11. The Broken Doll

The lights being out did more to unnerve Doc than everything else combined; he hated not being able to see anything other than a vague red miasma that might or might not have had visible shapes moving through it. The strain of trying to see in the murk made half-visible shapes dance in front of his eyes, and he didn't know if they were real or not until he screwed his eyes tightly closed and saw them against the backs of his eyelids.

Gai's hand was the only thing that seemed solid and real, and Doc clung to it like a lifeline. He knew the flashlight was in his left pocket again, and that he could dispel at least part of the inexplicable darkness, and that thought let him open his eyes and keep walking into the blankness.

"Wait here," Gai murmured, putting Doc's hand on the wall and sliding his own hand free. Doc didn't move without his teammate serving as anchor, the spike of panic that shouldn't have been there at all shoved down by the simple fact that he could still hear Gai moving around. "I think I found a ladder," Gai said.

Doc felt along the wall; there was a gap, and he felt carefully across it. It was wide enough to be a door or an access hatch, but he couldn't feel anything inside it.

"Here," Gai said softly, and gripped Doc by the wrist to move his hand to where Doc could feel what might in fact have been the rung of a ladder. "I can't see in there, though, I think the emergency lights are only in the corridor."

"Flashlight?" Doc asked. It wasn't really a question. He wasn't going to climb into anything blind.

Whatever Gai might have said in response was interrupted by a rasping sound, something scraping along the floor of the corridor and moving toward them. It was almost reminiscent of a snake Doc had once seen, after he'd escaped a Zangyack patrol for the first time and hidden in a rockslide. The snake had opened its jaws almost wider than Doc was tall, and he'd fled right back to the Zangyack soldiers. In the ensuing chaos, he'd managed to steal a vehicle and get well and truly away, but he'd had nightmares of the snake sliding across the rocky ground for weeks afterwards.

This sound wasn't quite the same, but it sent an atavistic shiver down Doc's spine, and he had plunged his hand into his pocket for the flashlight before he'd made a conscious decision. The light flicked on, pointing toward the noise, the light almost blinding after even such a short time in near-total darkness.

The beam flickered through the air, bouncing off a familiar shape. Green eyes under an incongruously wide forehead, inanimate features crammed over a pointed chin, and a barely-visible crest of feathers spiking upward before spilling out to one side resolved into the face of the doll he'd argued about with Gai. For a brief second, Doc felt relief that it was just a toy, before his mind inexorably pointed out that the face was hovering far closer to the ceiling than the ground.

Doc didn't have a chance to pan the beam downwards to see what was holding the doll up before the Gokai Gun screamed in his ear, the single shot taking the doll in the face and knocking it out of the flashlight's range.

"Go! Go!" Gai said, and Don dived into the shaft that might or might not have held a ladder. He grabbed what he hoped was a rung and climbed. Gai was right behind him, Gokai Gun switched to the left hand in case the doll-thing followed them, and Doc tried to climb faster. The next door up was blocked, and he abandoned it after only a few seconds of trying to get it open.

The second door was half-off its rails, and Doc shoved it open. He flung himself onto the deck, lights flickering on around him as he rolled to an ungainly stop. He made a cursory check to make sure there was nothing waiting, and then shone the flashlight back down toward Gai.

"Don't!" Gai said, trying to shield his eyes and climb without letting go of the Gokai Gun. Doc grabbed him by the back of his jacket and hauled him out of the shaft. The white face of the doll was below him, a round hole dead center in its forehead, and rising fast.

"It's coming," Doc said, and it was Gai's turn to drag him down the corridor.

The doll came floating out of the elevator on a bed of shadow that resolved itself in the light of the corridor into a writhing mass of cables. It oozed forward, eyes wide open and unblinking and fixed right on the two of them. The door widened in its wake, bits and pieces falling off to stick to the doll's body. As Doc watched, the pieces of the ship were subsumed into the doll.

"What?" he whispered, and felt Gai press the Gokai Gun back into his hand.

A quick glance showed him Gai's Gokai Spear, which he could have sworn Gai had tried and failed to call earlier. If anyone could do the impossible, it was Gai. Don took aim again and fired. The doll fell back, dark smoke curling upwards from where it had been hit.

"Regroup," Gai said, and yanked him around a corner. Doc trusted Gai to lead the way and spent more time looking behind them than where he was going. Gai stumbled to a half after far more twists and turns than Doc could keep track of; he didn't even know if they were on the same deck.

"What was that?" Doc asked.

"You're asking me? I was going to ask you. It was eating the ship!" Gai rubbed a hand across his face. "Obviously we have to go back and kill it before it gets any bigger."

"It might have been an Action Commander," Doc said.

"Most of those tend to go down – really? An Action Commander?" Gai turned the spear over and over in his hands, as though it would have answers, and then folded it into Gun Mode. Watching it defy space was a little headache-inducing, and Doc looked away until Gai was done.

"It might be worth the risk to use the Ranger Keys," Doc said slowly. He was the one who'd analyzed the freighter, and he was the one who'd looked at the results that said the benefits weren't worth the possibility of turning the immediate area into an inescapable fireball. He was beginning to think that the analysis had been flawed, or that at the very least, the Galleon and their suits could withstand the explosion.

"Of the ship's warp core going nuclear," Gai said, and Doc knew what all of those words meant, just not when Gai put them together in a sentence in that particular order.

"What?"

"The engine exploding," Gai explained, which clarified nothing about why he'd picked those words for the previous statement. "You said it would be a pretty big boom. Like a nuclear bomb, except more." He shivered as he spoke, and Doc remembered that nuclear fission had been used as a weapon on Earth in the past.

"A lot more," he confirmed. "I…"

"Then we can't," Gai said, and there was a shadow in his eyes that Doc didn't like. Not a shade of personal pain, more like something that had been impressed on him, over and over until it was as much a part of him as breathing. "Let's try not to blow up the entire freighter, okay?" His expression eased a little.

"Sure." Doc turned the gun over in his hands. Even if the energy of a full-fledged transformation might set off an energy fluctuation that could destabilize the ship's core, he was fairly sure using a Ranger Key to trigger a Final Wave Blast should be safe enough. "Grab your Ranger Key," he said, reaching for his.

"You just said –" Gai objected.

"I know what I said," Doc snapped, "and that's not what we're doing."

"I can't," Gai said, after a moment, and Doc had to admit defeat as well. The keys were supposed to come out of the box when called, whether it was one of the secondary keys or one of their primaries, but it felt like he was grasping smoke. He could feel the slick tension that always preceded the key materializing, and then nothing.

"So we'll improvise." Gai clapped him on the shoulder. "Let's go kill that thing before it really does eat the entire ship."

The vague plan they hashed out consisted mainly of shooting the Action Commander – Doc felt better calling it that, whether it was one or not, than Creepy Murderous Doll-Thing – until it stopped moving, and then stabbing it to make sure it stayed down. Gai kept reaching for his Ranger Key; Doc could tell, from the occasional look of intense concentration followed almost immediately by frustrated disappointment.

Surprise, Doc thought, would get them farther than direct confrontation. He'd expected Gai to argue that sneaking up on something and stabbing it in the back wasn't appropriate for a Super Sentai team, or that it wasn't honorable, or something, but Gai just shrugged and agreed.

"We're at a disadvantage already," he said. "If it doesn't see us coming, so much the better. Besides," he'd predicted sourly, "I doubt we're going to kill it with the first strike anyway, and then there will be plenty of time to face it head on."

Doc wished that Gai had been less correct, when they finally found the Action Commander. It stalked them as they stalked it, listening for the sound of cables dragging across the floor. Twice Doc saw the flash of what looked like a dark tentacle being whisked out of view and wanted to charge forward, and both times Gai had stopped him. "Trap," he'd said so quietly that Doc almost couldn't hear him, and changed their route.

The corridor where they finally caught up to it ended in a five-way intersection, and it saw them first. Black wire sliced through the air, and it would have taken Doc's head off if Gai hadn't pulled him out of the way in the nick of time. A single button fell to the floor, and then they were off and running.

"Come on, you crunchy excuse for an octopus!" Gai shouted, darting back down the corridor. He flung himself to the ground and rolled under the web they'd painstakingly strung across the walls, using the silver threads from Gai's sleeping roll. It was utterly insubstantial, but would hopefully serve as a shiny distraction.

The doll swarmed down the hallway, pulling itself up short just before touching the thread, and Doc stepped out from an alcove behind it. He got three shots into the back of its head as Gai, Gokai Spear back in spear form, slashed across the Action Commander's front and then impaled it.

A single tentacle cracked to the side, fetching up against the wall as the Action Commander quivered. It was only motionless for a brief second before two more tentacles snapped around and tried to catch Gai from either side. He fell back before the onslaught, severing one outright and dodging the other. Doc pressed forward, continuing to fire, but the Action Commander ignored him entirely and focused entirely on Gai.

"Behind you, you creepy freak!" Doc shouted, trying to get at least some of its attention and give Gai the chance to do something other than simply react. Gai was bleeding in half a dozen places, jacket torn, but his movements were as sure as ever. The Action Commander just kept going, pulling paneling away from the wall.

Gai dodged down one corridor and then another, but the Action Commander kept moving inexorably forward. Doc would have laughed, if its steadfast movement in the face of everything they did to stop it didn't look like it was going to end with the death of one of his friends.

"Gai, stairs!" he called. "Go up!"

Gai didn't acknowledge him, and he was starting now to show signs of strain, but he picked the next corridor as instructed. If Doc remembered correctly, they should be approaching a maintenance junction. A strangled gasp from in front of him pulled his eyes toward his teammate, and a spatter of blood followed the Action Commander's limb as it pulled back. The red stain on Gai's jacket was small, to Don's relief, but it meant he had to finish this now.

The stairs appeared around the corner, and Gai backed up them, spear in front of him. The Action Commander was playing with him, now, feinting to see if he would fall for it. Gai didn't press any of the false openings, aiming instead for the only real one. The Action Commander gushed a shower of sparks, and Gai took the opportunity to back farther away and reassemble the Gokai Spear into Gun Mode again. He sighted, aimed, and fired, and the Action Commander staggered. It was almost in Don's reach now; he had pulled open the panel he had hoped was there, and had started rearranging the insides.

If the freighter was close enough to standard Zangyack specs, and if there was enough power in the system, and if Don could get it twisted around the right way – his plan was a long shot, a desperate shout into what he hoped wasn't a void. Electricity arced between two of the leads, and he snatched his hand away just in time. "Once more!" he shouted at Gai.

The Action Commander was gathering itself together, something crackling along its limbs.

"Now!" Don called.

"I did not come this far," Gai said, "to get murdered by calamari." He slammed his Ranger Key into the slot and turned it, pulling the trigger three times in quick succession. Doc pressed himself against the wall in the farthest alcove he could reach as the spear screamed _Final Wave!_ and the Supernova blast sent the Action Commander reeling into the box.

Power shuddered along its limbs, loud enough to drown out any other noise, building into a crescendo that shook the entire deck. Doc peered around the corner as it faded away and smoke billowed past. He tried to wave it away, coughing as its acrid stench caught in his throat. His ears rang in the sudden silence, and he moved as quietly as he could toward where the Action Commander might still be.

The deck was gone, as were the bulkheads around it. Doc peered downwards, but he couldn't see anything other than sparking wreckage and some sort of dripping fluid. He turned right, looking up the stairs. Half of them were missing as well, and he couldn't see Gai at all. "Gai?"

"Present," came Gai's voice, and the smoke thinned enough for Doc to see his crewmate sprawled at the top of the ruined stairwell. His jacket was singed, but he pushed himself to a kneeling position without too much apparent difficulty. "Can you get up here?" he asked after a moment, blinking down at Doc in a way that Doc didn't like; there had been a significant lag between his first statement and his second, and his words had run together. Something dripped into his eye, and he brushed it irritably away.

"Um." Doc eyed the staircase. If he could reach the railing, he could probably make it up – or he could go around. "I think so," he said. He absolutely did not want to split up.

"You think so?" Gai was looking more alert than he had a moment ago. "Don, if it's too dangerous, we'll find another way around."

"No," Doc said, with what should have been conversation-ending resolution.

"There are any number of – this place is like a maze," Gai said, and by the end of the sentence, his voice was crisp and clear. The continuing drip from what Doc could now see was a nasty gash in his temple didn't reassure Doc in the slightest, though, and he wanted to leave Gai to fend for himself even less than he himself wanted to be on his own.

"I don't think we should split up," Doc said. Something clattered in the bottom of the hole the explosion had punched through multiple decks, and he leaned forward to look. There was movement at the bottom, but he couldn't tell what it was. "Ahim? Luka?"

Whatever was moving froze, but didn't answer.

"Did you find them?" Gai asked eagerly.

"I don't think it's them," Doc said slowly. "I'm going to jump across, okay?"

"No," Gai said. "Look, if you go back down that way, and take a left, right, there should be another way up here. We've been doing this all day. There's a pattern, right? Do not try to jump over that hole."

The clattering noises resumed, as if something was trying to climb up from the bottom, but Doc couldn't see clearly that far down.

"Left," Gai reminded him. "I'll be waiting at the top of the stairs."

Something shifted in the wreckage, and Doc looked at it once more before nodding. "I'll be right there."

The staircase that should have led him almost straight to where Gai was waiting wasn't there; Doc climbed up a ladder instead, far too many meters down the corridor for him to be entirely comfortable, and then down another half-stairway. It didn't even surprise him that by the time he got to where Gai should in theory have been waiting, the other man was nowhere to be seen.

"I knew this was going to happen," he muttered, and tried to center himself. If he was where he thought he was, the site of the explosion was no more than a few turns away. He left another button in the intersection, noting with a sense of déjà vu that he'd left a button in a five-way junction twice now, and set off down what he thought was the right hallway.

Doc refused to admit that he was lost until he could find no evidence of either the fight with the Action Commander or the five-way junction he'd marked when he'd gone looking for Gai.

"Stupid," he muttered to himself. "Stupid, stupid, stupid. We shouldn't have separated."

Self-pity wasn't going to get him anywhere. The original plan had been to go back to the Galleon, and find the others from there. Doc took a deep breath, and then another. He had to trust that Gai would fail to find him and then do the same thing he was doing – instead of running around with very little chance of finding his friends, take the course of action with the highest probability of success.

Doc wished that he could suppress the sinking feeling that Gai was more likely to subscribe to the _never leave a man behind_ school of thought, and get into trouble that he couldn't get back out of because he refused to stop searching for Doc. "Stay safe," he whispered, and started looking for routes leading upward.


	12. One Out of Two

Don wasn't coming. Gai hadn't found the stairs that should have been there, and the constant drip into his eye was really beginning to piss him off. He kept trying to brush it away, and it kept coming back. His shirt was sticking to his side, under his jacket, but he was afraid to touch it. It hurt, too, but if he kept moving he could ignore it. The problem was when he was standing still.

The wall seemed like a bad idea, but Gai leaned against it anyway, letting his head rest against the cool material. His thoughts were sluggish, but at least it didn't seem like he was looking at everything through thick wavery glass any more. "Stop that," he said. "Don's not here. Don should be here, but he isn't."

The clear course of action was to go and meet Don halfway, but Gai had somehow managed to lose track of which direction he'd been going in a hallway with no intersection outside of a staircase downwards for twelve meters in either direction. The staircase jogged at his mind, and he looked at it for a moment before it occurred to him that meeting Don halfway would mean going down the staircase and not back down the hallway.

"Did you get hit in the head?" he asked himself. "You couldn't possibly forget being hit in the head." It turned out that he had, in fact, forgotten being hit in the head; he reached up to wipe something dripping out of his eyes and came back with fresh blood smeared on a hand covered in tacky brownish-red already. "Well, that's probably bad."

Gai had been doing something. He'd been waiting for Don, but Don was late, and Gai was going to look for him. He checked his grip on the Gokai Spear, which was inexplicably in Gun Mode. It was easier to carry in Gun Mode, to be fair, so he left it, and eyed the staircase.

"Down," he murmured. "Don's down there somewhere."

The stairs turned out to be treacherous, tilting one way and then the other before they finally evened out. Gai blinked as they wavered and then firmed, and then he was at the bottom. There was something down there with him, something vaguely human-shaped with far too pale skin and wearing rags. Bony fingers reached out toward him, and Gai moved as if in a dream.

He raised the barrel of the gun-mode spear and fired a single precise shot toward each creature's head. Four of the five dropped in their shuffling tracks, but the fifth kept coming. _Ah_ , he thought. _I missed_. He shot a sixth time, noting that a neat hole appeared right between the creature's eyes. For a second it was blanked out by a doll's face, dark hole right between green oversized eyes, and Gai shot the thing again. It fell, but he knew it was going to get right back up again.

He had to send it backwards, to where Don was setting up a trap, but it was on the ground and not moving. He shot it in the chest twice, and a third time, but it refused to get up and be flung backwards. The doll's face faded, the shadow of cables and writhing limbs retreated, and Gai found himself breathing hard and staring down at something that had clearly been dead for a very long time. There was a veritable pile in front of him, as he stood with his back to the wall.

Gai turned to the other side, expecting a clear corridor, but more of the dead things were piled on the floor. He didn't remember looking behind him, but something was upright and moving toward him. Someone was shouting. Someone was shouting his name.

* * *

No evidence of a fight presented itself down the hallway Luka hadn't really picked, but they hadn't gone far before Luka heard the sound of gunfire. It came in single shots, as if the person firing was lining each one up precisely before taking it, and Luka thought she could tell where it was coming from.

Ahim nodded and they sprinted toward the sound. The echoes steered them into a dead end twice before Luka skidded to a halt. A crowd of the partially mechanical creatures was closing on Gai – and only Gai – who was facing half away from them and methodically decimating the mass of creatures coming from the other direction. He didn't seem to be aware that there were more of the creatures than in his direct field of vision. Luka charged forward without thinking, shouting.

Right behind her, Ahim fired again and again, thinning the mass of creatures before Luka crashed into it. They went down without much effort, but there were enough of them that Luka was afraid they were going to pull Gai down before he figured out they were there. She shouted again, trying to get their attention, and the tide turned. Ahim stood behind her as Luka scanned the corridor for more of the creatures, but the only ones she could see were dead or dying. Gai was standing over the last one, Gokai Spear in Gun Mode, firing over and over into its chest.

"Gai," Luka said, for the third time, and he finally stopped. She didn't think he'd heard her; he looked around at the pile of the dead in front of him as though seeing it for the first time before slowly turning around. He didn't seem to see them, either. "Gai," she said again, more loudly, as Ahim did the same.

Whatever had happened to their crewmate, he was a mess. His eyes weren't quite tracking them, and a dark bruise across one temple surrounded a vicious-looking cut. Gai reached up to rub at it absently with a hand so covered in tacky dried blood that Luka thought for a moment he was wearing a glove.

"Gai," she said yet again, and this time he actually looked at her.

"Luka," he said, the syllables getting tangled. "Ahim."

Luka stepped forward, carefully. "Gai, where's Doc?"

Gai's face crumpled and he slid to his knees. "I lost him," he said, tears cutting almost clean tracks in the grime covering his face. "I told him to go around, and then I lost him."

Ahim stepped delicately around the dead and crouched in front of Gai. "Do you know where?" she asked gently. Gai shook his head. Ahim reached out and brushed the moisture away from his cheeks. "Are you hurt anywhere else?" she asked, just as gently.

"I don't think so." Gai sighed, rubbing his face. It only made things worse. He stood, unsteadily. "We have to go find Doc. That thing might still be out there."

"What thing?" Luka asked.

The story about a doll stripping away the walls to create a monstrous body was mostly incoherent, although Luka didn't know if that was because Gai was clearly talking through a concussion or whether they'd run into something even nastier than walking half-cybernetic creatures meant to be front-line shock troops in a war that had ended a very long time ago.

"Oh," said Ahim, when Gai repeated that particular detail, and then explained when Luka raised one eyebrow. "One of the early civilizations conquered by the Zangyack," she said. "That's why the freighter design looked a little familiar. We studied their fall."

"That doesn't tell me about cyborgs," Luka said.

"The main product of that world was cybernetics," Ahim said. "Military, specifically, but the version they were using when the Zangyack conquered them didn't do well as an export. Apparently having one's army continue fighting after the actual citizens were deceased was distasteful."

Luka looked at the creatures. "You mean this was the merchandise? Not the crew?"

Ahim spread her hands apart and made a movement that would have been called a shrug on anyone else. Ahim managed to make it look refined.

"Zombies," Gai said suddenly. Ahim peered into his eyes, pulled him over to the nearest working light, and looked again.

"I don't like the way he looks," she said, which was such an understatement that Luka had to choke back laughter. "He needs to be scanned."

"No," Gai said, and a measure of lucidity returned to his gaze. Luka didn't know what Ahim had been looking for before, but it seemed like it was gone now. "I'm not leaving without finding Doc. I'm the one who told him we had to split up."

"At that giant crater?" Luka guessed.

"There was no way he could have jumped over it," Gai said. Luka wasn't going to argue that point, given how the staircase had fallen without warning. "So I told him to go around and that I'd meet him, and then I couldn't find him."

Luka exchanged a look with Ahim; if they were both on the same page, then knowing that the creatures – she was not going to call them zombies no matter how much Gai's word was sticking in her brain – were the cargo rather than the crew meant that all of their assumptions on the creatures' limited numbers were invalid. "Ahim, you take Gai back up to where Marvelous moored the Galleon," she said. "I'll find Doc and meet you up there."

"No," Gai said again. It was the lack of his usual frenetic energy that was so disturbing, Luka thought, the way he was moving stiffly and almost carefully. He didn't usually slow down even for being injured, and that he was obviously not firing on all cylinders now was more disturbing than the gash she could now see across his ribs. "I'm not leaving him behind."

"He might be headed that way," Ahim said. "If he couldn't find you, Doc would go to what would be most likely to help him, and that's the systems on board the Galleon."

Gai narrowed his eyes, not quite convinced. A rasping noise cut off whatever he was going to say, the echoes bouncing off the bulkheads.

"Now what?" Luka wanted to scream in frustration.

"That's – whatever it was that was pretending to be a doll," Gai said. He actually started down the corridor towards it, picking his way determinedly around the heaps of the creatures half-blocking the floor. Luka grabbed him by the back of shirt and hauled him the other way.

"Discretion and valor," she said. "We're going this way."

"But what if it has Don?" Gai argued.

"It doesn't." Gai was still struggling, but Luka was stronger than he was, at least at the moment, and Ahim was helping. They were out of the corridor and around the corner before she let go. "It doesn't, because Doc is better than that. You know it, and I know it, and we're going to do exactly what he would have done, and go up to the Galleon."

The freighter was a lost cause. She was going to strangle the next person who suggested they answer a distress call. Gai hesitated for a long moment before falling in beside her, Ahim bringing up the rear. It was, of course, at that precise moment that the rasping noise sounded from in front of them, and Luka dodged down a side corridor.

"We need to move up," Ahim said, but when they reached the next set of stairs upwards, the thing was in front of them again.

"This way." Luka thought she had a handle on how the cargo hold was laid out, and she took them around enough corners to avoid the probable Action Commander. It meant doubling back, heading toward the bow of the ship rather than back toward the middle section below the bridge, but if she could find the access shaft she thought she remembered seeing on the map, it would get them up six decks without running into anything in the halls.

The Action Commander was between them and the corridor Luka thought would take them to the access ladder, and she waved Ahim and Gai back around another corner. Every route they tried to take was cut off, and she found herself leading them on a retreat that started to cover some very familiar ground.

Doc's button on the floor in the junction confirmed it. Luka could see it from where they were crouched in an alcove, Gai leaning against the wall as if it was the only thing holding him up. "Does it seem like we're being herded to you?" she asked. It was a rhetorical question.

"We keep getting closer to where Gai and Doc defeated it the first time," Ahim said.

"And we get dumped in the pit this time." Luka shook her head. "We need another plan."

"We could just blow it out the goddamn airlock," Gai said, with inflections that weren't his at all.

"Are you quoting something?" Luka asked sharply, and he gave her a shaky thumbs up.

"No, he's right," Ahim said. "If it's absorbing the ship, we need to get it off the ship."

"Easier said than done." Luka tapped a finger thoughtfully against her lips. "How close are we to the hull?"

"Closer than you think," Ahim said.

Three corridors and one half-set of stairs would get them within spitting distance of the hull, and then it was just a matter of getting the Action Commander into an airlock, along with opening the airlock and not getting pulled out themselves.

"Piece of cake," Luka said, but quietly enough that hopefully neither of her crewmates could hear it.

"Would this help?" Gai asked, holding up his Ranger Key. "Don thinks maybe using them won't cause a, uh. Whatever it is that would make the freighter explode."

"Maybe?" Luka said.

"He thinks the Galleon might have been, um." Gai searched for the word. "Something's wrong with the Galleon," he said finally. "Because it kept sending our pings back, even when we checked in late."

"How big of a maybe?" Luka demanded, but she was already trying to reach her Ranger Key. It wouldn't come to her hand.

"It doesn't matter," Ahim said. "I can't summon my Ranger Key."

"Neither can I," Luka started, but she was cut off by the ceiling in front of them crashing down in a tangle of writhing wires. Incongruously, a doll was nestled in the center of the tangled mass, its perfect artificial face marred by a single hole right between the eyes.

Ahim fired on the Action Commander without missing a beat. Luka joined her, the two of them backing away slowly. Leading it to an airlock would be easier with it chasing them, Luka thought, and then Gai ruined their carefully laid plans with a single phrase.

"Gokai Change!"

Silver light flared from behind them, the Gokai Cellular screaming "Gokaiger!" as Gai stepped forward in silver armor.

"Shit," Luka whispered, but the ship didn't explode on the spot, and the Action Commander was a bigger worry. She exchanged a glance with Ahim, but neither of them could reach their Ranger Keys. Ahim nodded at her, and they continued to try to lay down suppressing fire while Gai figured out whatever it was that he was going to do.

Gai's weapon was in spear mode; he batted the Action Commander's onslaught aside before the reaching tentacles could wind around him, hacking and slashing at the tangle. Luka kept as far away as she could, targeting the tendrils that Gai missed. Ahim was facing the other way entirely, Luka noticed after a moment.

"What are you doing?"

"Making sure we're not ambushed," Ahim said serenely, just as the first of the creatures rounded the corner. Luka didn't know whether they were attracted to the noise or whether they had been summoned by the Action Commander, but either way Ahim had it under control. The creatures still didn't move quickly enough to overwhelm Ahim, and they didn't seem to have developed any strategy beyond walk forward until getting shot in the head.

Luka turned her attention back to Gai and the Action Commander; the monster had drawn itself straight up, crashing through the deck above and sending debris raining through the corridor. Luka's immediate thought was to wonder if it had released another set of the freighter's cargo, but none of the debris was moving of its own volition. Gai dodged most of the larger pieces, until a section of a support beam hit his shoulder and sent him sprawling.

The Gokai Spear clattered across the floor, but Gai was already getting up. He wasn't going reach it in time – the Action Commander struck swiftly, and it was going to impale him or catch him before he could close his hands around the weapon. Luka acted without thinking, throwing herself forward to knock the tentacle off course. She slammed into it shoulder first, barely managing to redirect it. She hit Gai instead, but he'd somehow managed to grab the Gokai Spear and didn't lose his grip.

Luka bounced off of Gai toward the Action Commander and came up on her feet, Gokai Gun pointed at its creepy artificial face, and the doll suddenly seemed like a distraction. It was too perfect of a target. She lowered her sights slightly, aiming for the pulsing mass below the doll. It was barely visible against the rest of the Action Commander, but where the tentacles were jagged with partially absorbed material, this section was smooth and dark, its color uniform. Luka hit it three times in quick succession, and the Action Commander staggered back.

"Luka, get out of the way!"

Luka fell back without looking behind her, trusting that Ahim was still standing and that Gai wouldn't run her over. He darted in front of her, Ranger Key locked into place in the Gokai Spear. It was in Gun Mode, and it screamed _Final Wave!_ as Gai shouted, "Gokai Supernova!"

"Ahim, move, move, move!"

There were zombie creatures in front of them and Gai was about to detonate a massive explosion behind them. Ahim grabbed Luka by the wrist and ran through the creatures; perhaps unnerved by an apparently direct assault, they fell back for a second before regrouping. It was all the time Luka and Ahim needed to break through their ranks and around the nearest corner.

A roar like a freight train thundered through the corridor, breaking off so suddenly that Luka's ears rang and she almost couldn't hear the crackling energy before the impossibly loud sound of an explosion and a blast of superheated air rushed past them. Gai tumbled backwards, landing gracelessly on the floor, armor still intact. A mass of the creatures were thrown back with him, none of them moving after they were slammed into the deck plates.

After a very long moment, Gai groaned and pushed himself to his knees, armor fading away. "Did we get it?" he asked.

Luka ventured around the corner, looking into a pit of smoke and flickering flame. Getting the hell off the freighter was looking like a better and better option all the time, they were going to keep setting off explosions in a giant pressurized tin can. It was a testament to the freighter's structural integrity that it hadn't simply cracked in half already. "I think so," she said. Nothing was moving, or at least nothing that she could see through the smoke.

"Oh, good." Gai was leaning on Ahim when Luka turned around, but he was on his feet. "Can we go home now?"

"We have to find Doc first," Luka reminded him, and Gai's eyes widened almost comically.

"With that much noise," Ahim said, "maybe he'll find us."

"Or maybe he did the smart thing and is still headed toward the Galleon," Luka said sharply. There was a way upwards somewhere around here. She took point, Ahim supporting a still-shaky Gai, but no more of the creatures found them. It made Luka wonder if they had been connected to the Action Commander after all. "We should do the same thing."

An ominous creaking behind her didn't disgorge any of the creatures, but it did herald the lights going out completely.

"Guys," Gai said, cautiously. "I, uh, I can't see."

"The lights are out," Ahim said.

"Oh, good," Gai said. "I mean, no, that's bad. I thought it was just me."

"You're probably fine," Luka said. "Or at least as fine as the rest of us."

"Don had the flashlight," Gai said, somewhat mournfully.

"Like this one?" There was a click, and then a beam of blue-white light that seemed far brighter than it should illuminated the hallway. It bounced back and forth as Ahim fastened some sort of strap around her wrist.

"How long have you had that?" Luka demanded.

"We didn't need it before," Ahim said. It was surprisingly compact, but the strap meant that Ahim could use the flashlight while keeping her hands more or less free for something else. In this case, the something else was Ahim's arm around Gai's waist.

"Of course," Luka muttered, and fell in on Gai's other side. She refused to consider that the lights going out was the first step in a catastrophic cascade failure; if Doc had determined that the analysis was wrong, that was what she was going to believe. She tried the Mobilate again, just in case the interference was gone, but no one picked up on the other end no matter who she tried, and she still couldn't call her Ranger Key.

"Gai," Ahim said, as they picked their way across the floor. Getting beyond the debris only took a few minutes, and then Luka started looking for some sort of staircase; there was no way they were getting Gai up a ladder, and she absolutely did not trust any of the lifts.

"Huh?" Gai blinked, and looked down at Ahim. "Yeah?"

"How is it that you were able to summon your Ranger Key?" she asked.

Gai shrugged, and then winced, and then nearly tripped. Luka shoved him back upright. "I dunno," he said. "I just had to push really, really hard this time, but it was – it was kind of like making Gokai Christmas. If I wanted it enough, I knew it would be there."

"Are you telling me we just didn't try hard enough?" Luka said, trying and failing to keep the edge out of her voice.

"What? No!" Gai paused. "I don't know. I don't know why."

"Gai's connection to the Ranger Keys has always been somewhat unique," Ahim said softly. "He was given his by a different source, after all."

"I guess." Luka frowned. She usually didn't remember – or at least think about – Gai having been chosen by the universe, or at least by dead former Sixth Rangers to be Gokai Silver after nearly dying in an act of selfless heroism. If she thought about it, he'd done the unthinkable more than once, simply with his refusal to consider that what he was trying wouldn't work. Right now, though, he seemed to be using all of that conviction to put one foot in front of the other.

"It's okay," Ahim said, answering Luka's unasked question. "We're doing fine."

"Right."

The plan was to go upwards until they couldn't go any farther up; Luka found stairs, and she and Ahim got Gai up them. On one occasion, one of the creatures came wandering out of the murk. Luka shot it before Ahim could do so much as twitch the flashlight beam farther toward it, but it hadn't been moving toward them at all, and although she hit it in the torso rather than the head, it went down and stayed down.

"You think they got switched off?" Luka asked, prodding it with her boot when they got close enough. It looked almost pathetic like this, and she put a bullet in its head purely as a precaution, not because she wanted it to stop looking at her.

"Perhaps," Ahim said. They had somehow wandered toward the bow of the ship again; Luka could see signs indicating airlocks in one direction. "It depends on the software, and what their primary directives were."

Luka picked the direction away from the airlocks, but they walked far enough before finding anything that went upwards that she was beginning to doubt her sense of direction. The staircase she did find led up to a ledge with no doors at all, at least none that she could see. After only a few meters, the ledge vanished into a corridor that seemed somehow darker than everything else, and Luka belatedly recognized the almost invisible red glow of emergency lights behind them that had been doing a piss-poor job of lighting anything at all. The new corridor didn't even have those; it was pitch dark.

"Controlled access to the cargo holds," Ahim said, and started walking down the dark hallway as if she knew exactly where she was going. Maybe she did. Luka jogged to catch up, and when doors appeared on the left, Ahim walked right past them. Given that they were on the same side of the hall as the staircase they'd come up, Luka deduced that they would lead right back into the cargo hold. They also made her unreasonably nervous about what might come out of them, after the creatures and the Action Commander.

Ahim turned out to be correct in that there was limited access to the cargo holds from this side of the ship as well; the door they eventually found was reminiscent of the arch that had let them into the cargo hold from the engine compartments, down to the heavy blast door that was sealing it off.

"Great," Luka said. The access panel next to the blast door was as dark as everything else, and she pushed down the irrational fear that the blast door was sealed because there was a vacuum on the other side and the rest of the ship was gone. If that was the case, they were doomed no matter what they did. Besides, if any part of the ship was leaking atmosphere, it was going to be the parts in which Gai had attempted to blow up an Action Commander. Twice.

"Can you open it?" Ahim asked.

"Maybe." Luka had made her way through a number of locked doors in the past; the main issue here was the lack of power. The door closed sideways, though, not up and down, and if she could find some sort of manual release, she was fairly sure they could just shove it open.

Ahim and Gai settled against the wall, Gai with an audible sigh of relief as he sank down. Luka could hear the two of them talking quietly, and tuned it out. The access panel gave her almost nothing useful, the wires and connections inside completely inert. She found a catch to release a secondary panel, though, which turned out to be what looked like half the wall next to the blast door.

"Ahim, can you read any of this?"

The script covering the inside the panel wasn't standard Zangyack, not that Luka would have expected it to be, but it also wasn't something she'd seen before. Ahim paced over, peering at the lines of dense scribbles. "It looks vaguely familiar, but I don't know what it says."

"Hopefully nothing along the lines of pull this lever for explosion," Luka said, and Gai laughed. It broke off quickly into an exclamation of pain, but she took it as a good sign anyway.

The lever in question released something, and the door settled in its groove. Luka experimentally pumped the lever again, and the door shifted to the side. She got it almost halfway open before the lever stuck and she couldn't move it any further. It was enough of a gap for them to fit through, particularly since whatever door had sealed off that particular entrance before the blast door had come down was open.

The most encouraging part of the entire thing, though, was that as soon as the door was open enough to see the corridor beyond, the glare of lights spilled through the crack. Ahim and Gai let off a small cheer at the sight, and Luka grinned at them. By the time the door stuck, it was bright enough that Luka could switch off the flashlight.

"I never thought I would be so happy to see working light bulbs," Gai said. He was using the wall to climb to his feet, but he looked better than he had when the lights had gone off.

Luka went through first, blinking in light that seemed incredibly bright, looking for anything hazardous. She didn't see any of the creatures, for which she was grateful, but she felt a sharp flare of disappointment that she didn't see any of her teammates either. The odds that anyone would have been outside that particular door at the moment they went through it were so low as to be functionally zero, but she couldn't help feeling let down.

"Looks okay," she said. Once her vision had adjusted, she could tell that the light was dimmer than it should have been, with several of the lights flickering and more not working at all, but it was still an improvement over the pitch dark or the alleged emergency lights.

Gai climbed through the door under his own power, Ahim taking up the rear. Luka kicked at the door once Ahim was through, more to dispel her lingering sense of upset at her crewmates for not being there than anything else, and the door surprised her by sliding heavily shut.

"Oops." She blinked at it.

"We shouldn't have trouble with anything following us now," Ahim said, as if determined to find a silver lining.

"Ugh." Luka looked up and down the corridor, but there was nothing indicating which way the bridge was. She had the sinking feeling that all of the transportation between decks on the upper levels was going to be lifts or vertical access tunnels with ladders, but they'd cross that bridge when they came to it. _Heh, bridge_ , she thought.

"You know, we still don't know where the crew is," Gai said, looking around. He was almost steady on his feet, bouncing off the corridor walls periodically as they made their way toward what Luka hoped was an accessible way farther up. "If those creatures were the cargo, what happened to the people?"

"Gai," Luka said. "You're the one who keeps telling the rest of us not to ask questions like that. Tempting fate. You're the one who says it's like daring the universe to answer the question in the worst way possible."

"I was wrong about the zombies," Gai said cheerfully. "They didn't actually try to eat us."

"One has nothing to do with the other," Luka said. A muffled noise came from Ahim, and when Luka looked over, the other woman had a hand pressed to her mouth. "Ahim? Is something wrong?"

Ahim removed the hand, and Luka could now see that she had been trying not to laugh out loud. "It's just nice to hear everyone acting normal again," she said, eyes sparkling.

Luka rolled her eyes exaggeratedly, which did nothing to quell Ahim's amusement. The discovery of a working display in what might or might not have been a recreational area only served to further improve Ahim's mood, particularly when she found a map that would give them precise directions up to the bridge and the theoretical location of the Galleon.

"Lifts," Luka sighed. "I do not trust the lifts."

"Who said anything about a lift?" Gai was pale again, but his hands were steady as he pointed out what might have been maintenance tunnels. "Look, there are ladders."

"Are you sure you can climb a ladder?" Luka eyed him dubiously. For all that he'd been walking without assistance, he was still limping, and he was still favoring his left side. The head wound had stopped bleeding, and he didn't seem to be disoriented any more, but he was still way below his normal energy levels.

"I can do anything," Gai said, grinning at her fiercely. It was a spot-on impression of Marvelous' usual grin, and Luka felt the breath catch in her throat. The grin faded and Gai looked at her quizzically. Luka shook her head.

"Let's get going."


	13. Resurfacing

Doc climbed upwards, trying very hard not to feel like he was abandoning an injured comrade to either a potential horde of bloodthirsty undead soldiers or an immortal Action Commander. His Gokai Gun was tucked in his belt and his flashlight was in his pocket, but there was just barely enough light in the shaft for him to be able to see.

As far up as he could get took him to yet another level of the pressurized cargo hold, and Don looked up and down the corridors. He had no idea which way might take him toward the center of the ship, the living quarters, and ultimately the command decks. "What am I doing," he muttered to himself, and rubbed his damp palms on his pants. He had to pick a direction; not going anywhere wouldn't solve anything.

The corridor to his left looked a little better lit, and knowing that it was a poor indicator for correct directions, he picked it anyway. Nothing leapt out at him from the side corridors or the shadows, at least, which he took to be a good sign.

He couldn't find anything going upwards, either, which was less encouraging. The freighter felt more like a maze than a proper ship, and he was really starting to resent its designers. There was no way the structure optimized the loading and unloading of any sort of cargo, unless one had a crew intimately familiar with the ridiculously convoluted tunnels, which meant that one would have to maintain a ridiculously huge crew instead of hiring temporary workers at each port.

Doc managed to work up a solid burn of irritation before it occurred to him that he was trying to cover nerves with anger, and the sense of righteous indignation melted away. It had carried him far enough to find another knot of stairs and ladders up and down, and he moved upwards as quickly as he could.

The top of the ladder pretending to be a staircase – and really, how did anyone think they were going to transport anything up or down that – gave him the same dilemma as before, but this time Doc didn't hesitate before picking a direction at random. It landed him in a dead end, but he told himself that it just meant he knew what direction not to go. He didn't believe it.

It took far too long before Doc found himself in a featureless hallway, lit almost painfully brightly in comparison to the rest of the cargo maze. He refused to call it a cargo hold in the privacy of his own mind. The corridor had absolutely nothing to indicate what it was or where it might lead, but there was a hatch visible on the opposite side almost entirely out of sight. Hoping it wasn't an airlock, Doc made for it.

The hatch didn't look like an airlock when he got close enough; it looked like a perfectly normal door to another section of the ship. "With my luck," he said to it, "I'm going to open you, and then die a horrible death in the vacuum of space."

The door didn't answer; it just sat there smugly. Doc shook his head. His nerves really were shot if he was attributing intent to a door. "Stay safe until I find you, Gai," he said, and mentally tacked on the rest of his crewmates. Not that he doubted anyone's ability to take care of themselves; if any of them were going to need rescuing, it was going to be Doc himself.

Getting the door open didn't take that much effort, even if it stalled halfway and started to reverse; Doc slipped through it with just enough time to spare. It caught at a trailing strap on the pack that he had managed not to lose, and he tugged the pack free. He was vaguely tempted to leave it behind – Gai's had been lost, somewhere between the dead half-soldier on the floor and the Action Commander – but he was already going to have to replace at least one.

The new set of corridors had a completely different atmosphere than the cargo maze, and Doc felt fairly certain in assuming he'd made it into the living quarters. Given the choice of three directions, he picked straight ahead, which led him almost immediately to another dead end. It was what might have been a recreational area, but he noticed a panel on the wall bearing a pre-Zangyack symbol for medical supplies.

Reasoning that it couldn't hurt, Doc reached for the panel to open it. Just as his fingers brushed the release, he heard what sounded like a footstep behind him. His heart leapt into his throat as he spun around to face whatever it was, only to see dust drifting down from a broken ceiling panel. He approached the new hole in the ceiling cautiously, but nothing moved in the shadows. That didn't mean that there was nothing there, and he edged back toward the first aid compartment in the wall with one eye on the ceiling.

The compartment was empty; not only that, but there was a set of shackles embedded in the edge. It had dropped halfway out when he had opened the paneling, and he had the sinking feeling that if he'd reached inside, he would now be trapped. "Why do you keep doing this," he muttered, and kicked at the wall. The shackled snapped closed and tumbled out of the compartment, attached to its interior with a long, fine chain. "Stupid freighter."

He reached inside the compartment, just in case there was something in there, but found almost nothing. The only object was something that looked like a key; it didn't fit the shackles, but it did have a familiar outline that he couldn't quite identify. He slipped it into his pocket as a puzzle to be solved later, and went back to the hallways.

The crew quarters – at least, he was fairly sure they were crew quarters, although he couldn't be certain without actually opening doors that clearly led into rooms and he wasn't about to do that now – were less of a confusing maze than the cargo hold had been, and Doc found that he could make his way upward fairly quickly. He saw more of the first aid compartments on the walls, but the next three he tried also had spring-loaded traps, and he gave up on actually trying to find any sort of medical supplies.

A sign for the ship's clinic – or medical bay, or whatever it was that the freighter crew had called it – once he'd gone up several decks seemed either like a sign, or like a trap. Doc stared at it for a moment in indecision, but he knew the first aid kits on the Galleon were lacking in supplies. He was the one who stocked them. "This will only take a minute, right," he said quietly, and followed the sign.

The clinic door was propped open when he found it, and the sight of the familiar red pack sent simultaneous bolts of relief and apprehension through him. Doc stepped over it, carefully, looking around inside the clinic. There was no one immediately visible, but he could see several doors. He started on the right with the open doorway closest to him. "Hello? Joe? Marvelous?" More of a long shot, he thought, but he tried, "Ahim? Luka?"

No one answered, and he worked his way through all of the doorways. The clinic proved to have more space than he would have thought from the relatively modest reception area, and all of it had been left in disarray. He didn't see any sign of any of his teammates, except for the pack still in the main door, not even footprints in the dust that had settled over some of the rooms.

"Where are you?" he said, not expecting an answer, and he didn't get one. The last door in the reception area was closed, unlike most of the others, and he couldn't find an access panel. It had a sign above it and to the side that had script written in standard Zangyack below the flowing script that Doc couldn't read that had marked every other room, and he frowned at it. "Temporary re-training?"

The sign seemed out of place, newer than the rest of the freighter, although it was constructed of the same material and had a similar aesthetic. Not having found any other signs in standard Zangyack was enough to make Doc suspicious, though; even the sign for the clinic had only been legible because of the symbols next to each line of script. There was a button next to the door, and Doc pressed it.

The door slid obligingly open to reveal a sterile white room with a row of silvery gray pods; the two farthest from the door were closed, while the rest stood open. The wall in front of the pods had colorful moving graphs, marked with the same script that Doc couldn't read, but it was the neatly folded pile of clothes just in front of the second-farthest pod that made his heart skip a beat. Joe's jacket was clearly visible on top.

"What," he said, and started to walk through the door. A sudden sense of paranoia compelled him to shrug out of his pack and leave it in the doorframe at the last second, the way Joe's pack was holding open the door to the hall. The door started to slide shut as soon as he'd cleared it, held open by the pack. "Okay, what is going on here?"

There were windows of darkened glass, or plastic, or something partially translucent in the covers to each pod. Doc peered through the one with Joe's clothing folded next to it, and made out the dim outlines of his crewmate's face. There was something covering Joe's mouth and nose, but Doc was very sure that Joe had, for some inexplicable reason, stripped and climbed inside the pod. The other pod, now that he looked at it, had a label also written in standard Zangyack. Doc's heart dropped into his stomach as he read the script.

 _Sid Bamick._

"Oh, no," he said. The glass was darker on this pod, and he could barely make out the outlines of a face. He noticed there was nothing covering its lower half, and when he glanced over his shoulder, the colorful graph had frozen. "Joe, what did you do."

Rhetorical questions aside, Doc had to get Joe out of the machine. He looked for a release lever in the vain hope that it would be that simple, but if it had been, Joe would have pulled said lever on the pod allegedly holding his former commanding officer. Doc felt around for one anyway, absently noting the slight warmth of the pod and the almost imperceptible hum of active machinery under his hands. There wasn't enough of a gap to get his fingers in and pry the lid upwards, either. Doc checked the other pod, just in case, but as soon as he put his hands on it, something felt wrong.

The second pod was cool to the touch, and whatever machinery in it was inert. Doc squeezed behind it, looking for differences in the pods now, and whatever was currently running in Joe's pod was silent in the other. If there had ever been a time for cursing, now was it. Doc thumped the back of the quiet pod with a closed fist and crawled back out.

"There has to be a way to open you," Doc said to the pod, almost conversationally. There was nothing on the walls around the pods, nothing except the screens in front of them to suggest that the cluster wasn't self-contained. The screens themselves didn't appear physically connected to anything, which still didn't tell Doc how the cluster was or wasn't wired in to the freighter itself. He tried to remove one of the inert screens, but it was firmly bolted to the wall, and there was nothing on it in any case that suggested any sort of control.

The active screen connected to the alleged Sid Bamick pod wasn't a touch screen, somewhat to Doc's annoyance; having a complicated system with no apparent control method was poor engineering, he felt. He returned to the rear of the cluster, looking for anything that resembled a control panel. Far too much trial and error finally got him into the quiet pod's system, and after some fumbling, he figured out what to press to release the cover. It hissed open.

The pod was empty, when it opened, not that Doc had expected anything different. A flicking holographic display was attached to the window, projecting vague outlines of a face. Doc didn't know what Sid had looked like, before becoming Barizorg, but the face projected into the pod somehow gave off the impression of warmth. "I'm sorry for what happened to you," Doc murmured, and then felt ridiculous at talking to a static image of a man he'd never met.

Getting Joe's pod to open was a little more difficult; the sequence that had opened the inactive pod threw up an error message he couldn't read. Don glared at it and put in the sequence again, getting a second error message. Out of pure frustration, he keyed in the sequence a third time and was rewarded with the hiss of the pod opening.

"Yes," he said, and scrambled out from underneath the cluster.

The lid paused halfway, and Doc pushed it fully open. The air inside was cool, giving the brief impression of mist when it hit the warm atmosphere of the room before dissipating. Joe didn't respond to the cover lifting; Doc checked his pulse in a sudden fit of awful apprehension, but it was strong and regular. The mask was the next thing to go, coming off easily enough. Doc stuffed it back into the compartment it had apparently come out of.

"Joe," he said, getting not so much as a twitch. "Come on, Joe." He tried shaking Joe, and then slapping him. More than the fact that Joe was in fact entirely naked in the pod, the fact that Joe's skin was cool to the touch was unsettling. Doc stepped back and tapped his fingers on the edge of the closest open pod, trying to figure out his next move, and saw something he'd missed. A patch was attached to Joe's forehead, nearly invisible under his bangs. Doc pulled it off, hissing in pain as an electric charge sparked across his fingertips.

Removal of the patch provoked the first reaction Doc had seen; encouraged, he tried again to wake his teammate. It took what felt like a small eternity before Joe finally opened his eyes, even a little.

"Come on, Joe," Doc said. "Come on out of there."

Joe's skin was warmer than it had been, but still cool, and working against what he couldn't tell were half-hearted protests or thoroughly uncoordinated attempts to help, Doc got Joe out of the pod and dressed. Throughout the process, he couldn't help but notice that, although the pod seemed designed to physically maintain its occupant over an extended period of time, none of those systems had been engaged for Joe. He wasn't sure whether to be relieved that Joe hadn't been accidentally poisoned with spoiled materials or disturbed that the pod would have killed Joe within a few days.

"Next time, I'm going to let you stay naked," he said, although it wasn't exactly an unfamiliar sight.

"Doc?" Joe said.

It would have been more heartening to be recognized if Joe hadn't still been leaning so heavily against him. Instead of answering, Doc half-carried him out of the room and to one of the few chairs in the reception area that wasn't bolted down. Joe nearly tipped sideways out of the chair when Doc let go of him to retrieve the pack he'd had to kick out of the doorway, and when Doc pushed him back upright, he started coughing. It didn't last long, but he looked a little more alert at the end of it.

"Doc?" he said again.

"Yeah," Doc said. "Hang on for a second, okay? Just stay there." He retrieved his pack and a full water bottle from inside it. He half-expected to see the doll at the bottom of his pack, but it was nowhere to be seen. Maybe Gai had killed it after all.

Joe had his head in his hands when Doc held out the water bottle. "Where…" He stopped and cleared his throat, and tried again. "Where are we?" he asked.

"On the freighter," Doc said, crouching so that he was more or less at eye level. "Drink this."

"But…" Joe rubbed at his eyes. "The freighter?" he repeated, and he still looked lost.

"We answered a distress call." Doc opened the water and tried to hand it to Joe again. "We split up and came on board."

Joe frowned, clearly struggling to process, and this time Doc physically wrapped his hand around the water bottle. Joe drank, automatically, and then missed entirely when he tried to set the still mostly-full bottle down on the nearest flat surface. Doc righted it before it could spill too much and put it out of reach. "I found Sid," he said, finally.

"Joe," Doc said, and stopped, not sure how to tell Joe that someone had gone to the trouble of setting up what looked like a trap specifically designed to bait Joe Gibken, former member of the Zangyack Special Forces. "Sid isn't in the pod," he said, finally.

"No," Joe said, as if Doc was the one who was confused and disoriented. "Got him out of the pod. He should be on the Galleon." He rubbed at his eyes again. "We blew up the freighter."

"We're on the freighter," Doc said. He was starting to get an idea of what the plaque on the door meant when it said the room was for re-training purposes. "Sid was never in the pod."

"He was," Joe insisted. "I… I pulled him out of the simulation."

"Joe, I'm so sorry." Doc didn't know what else to say; Joe's expression was more open and raw than Doc had ever seen, and he felt like he was somehow maliciously invading Joe's privacy by seeing him so vulnerable. "The pod was… it was a trap, Joe."

Even as he was trying to comfort Joe, and that was such an unfamiliar role that it almost made Doc's skin crawl, he couldn't help but think that the clearly personal and malicious trap had very specific implications. The implications being, namely, that the entire freighter was a trap for the crew of the Gokai Galleon. Doc was suddenly glad that the worst he'd seen was a dead cyborg and an incredibly creepy Action Commander, and simultaneously terrified of what the rest of the crew had encountered.

"Joe, we have to go," he said, but Joe clearly wasn't up to going anywhere. Doc was the only thing keeping him upright in the chair.

"I'm not going without Sid," Joe said with remarkable stubbornness. "I'm not leaving him behind again."

"Joe, he's not _here_ ," Doc said, trying and failing to keep the edge out of his voice. The freighter was a trap that had been set specifically for them, and they were split up, and the Mobilates didn't work which should have been his first clue, and he couldn't summon his Ranger Key which should have been the second clue, and as far as he knew _nobody else knew_ they had been set up.

"I got…" Joe said, trailing off. "I got him out." His voice was small and uncertain, and Doc hated whoever it was that had set up the freighter for making him hear Joe sound like that.

"You and I are the only ones here," he said, and was somehow entirely unprepared when Joe buried his face in Doc's jacket and started to cry. It only lasted a moment before Joe quieted down, ragged breathing evening out, and Doc felt him tense.

"Doc?" Joe said, sounding lucid for the first time since he'd been hauled out of the pod.

"Yes?" Doc said hesitantly.

"I don't feel – something isn't right," Joe said, voice muffled against Doc's side.

"I found you in some sort of pod," Doc said, and were they really going to go through the whole thing again.

"Sid," Joe said, and all but shoved Doc away. He swayed in the chair for a moment before steadying himself. "Where's Sid?"

Doc tried to be patient. "He's not here, Joe. He was never here. You were the only one in a pod."

Joe stared at him for a moment, as if Doc were speaking a foreign language. "Show me," he said, finally.

Doc clenched his teeth against the automatic refusal and demand that Joe let it go already, because they were all probably going to die unless they either figured out what was going wrong or got off the freighter, and pointed at the now-closed door in the wall. "In there," he said.

Joe managed to make through the door and into the room, steps becoming more sure as he walked. When he got to the pod that had had Sid's name on it, though, the color drained out of his face and he sank slowly to the ground. "But he was here," he said.

"He wasn't," Doc said, the words coming out soft in the face of utter heartbreak. "It was a trap, designed specifically for you." He didn't think it was possible for Joe to get any paler, but it happened, and Joe turned a horrified look on him.

"Marvelous," he said. "Everyone else. Where's everyone else?"

"I don't know," Doc said, and Joe lurched to his feet.

"We," he said, and blinked hard. "I'm not – I'm not at my best."

It was not an admission that he would have made under anything resembling normal circumstances, and Doc had the feeling Joe was going to regret saying it later, but he nodded anyway. "You're not," he agreed. "The plan is to get to the Galleon, and use it to find everyone else."

"I trust you," Joe said, and something about the way he said it was both awful and at the same time the highest compliment he could have paid to Doc.

"Okay," Doc said, because it looked like Joe was waiting for some sort of answer. He had to help Joe stand, but Joe was okay once he was on his feet with his pack across his shoulders. Doc hadn't wanted to give it to him, but Joe had yanked it out of his hands with more force than was necessary.

The incident made Doc glad that he'd put Joe's Gokai Gun in his own pocket while getting Joe's clothes on him; if there was anyone on the freighter who should not have had a weapon in his hands at that particular moment, it was Joe Gibken.

"Are you sure it's there?" Joe asked, and Doc swallowed back his initial frantic denial of knowing where Joe's Gokai Gun was. Joe wasn't asking about the gun; he was asking about the Galleon. Of course he was asking about the Galleon. He tried to wipe the guilty expression off his face, although he wasn't sure Joe was even paying attention.

"It has to be," Doc said. He didn't want to think about what it would mean if Marvelous and the Galleon weren't where they were supposed to be.


	14. Built of Memory

First things first, he searched his pockets. There was nothing in there that might give him a clue as to his identity; all he found was an empty wrapper that smelled like chocolate and a bulky red and gold flip phone. It had a lock that went to nowhere when he opened it, which he considered and then dismissed. He let his hands move across the number pad without thinking about it, and was almost surprised to hear a ringing sound.

No one picked up on the other end, and he frowned at the useless device. He put it back in his pocket, though, with the thought that he had it for a reason. The empty wrapper he left on the floor.

The unfamiliar bridge held no further clues. The duty stations were unresponsive when he pressed a few buttons at random, the lights off. A crumpled pile of metal lay wedged underneath one of the consoles, looking almost like a twisted and tailed humanoid, but when he tried to look at it closely the vertigo got worse and he backed off. The entire bridge was grimy in the way of something in a planetary atmosphere collecting dust, and he wondered briefly why he had thought to differentiate between a planetary atmosphere and one aboard a ship, and then wondered why it would be strange.

"That's not helping," he muttered, and glanced back at the plethora of screens. All but three were dark or full of static. One of the screens was the same one from earlier that had had a row of silver pods; now two of the pods had flashing lights, and one had a neatly stacked pile of clothes at its base. He frowned at it for a moment and then turned his attention to the other two screens.

One screen showed two blond men walking down a nondescript hallway; the hall itself was narrow, and there were a number of short staircases that he could see branching off from said hallway, and doors at irregular intervals. The men were markedly dissimilar for all that their hair was nearly the same color; the lighter blond moved nervously, occasionally wiping his hands on his dark green jacket, while the darker blond in the silver jacket was more expansive in his movements. His socks were such a fascinating riot of color that he couldn't help staring at them for several moments as the silver-jacketed blond moved away from the camera.

Tearing his attention away from the nightmarish socks, he looked at the final functioning screen. Two women ran past the camera, both with dark hair, one in pale lacy skirts and the other in a mustard yellow jacket and shorts. Both of them were wearing knee-high boots that he didn't think were appropriate for running. The woman in lace had a sweet face, while the other looked angry.

"Do you know who I am?" he said, knowing that no one could hear him.

 _They're looking for you._

He spun around, searching for the source of the voice, but there was no one there. Vertigo bubbled upwards again, milder than at first but enough to send him staggering sideways into one of the duy stations. He clutched at it, eyes still darting around to see who or what had spoken. "Show yourself!"

Stubborn silence was his only answer. He took a deep breath and stepped away from the duty station. The room stayed more or less stable, and he aimed for the nearest door. It led to a small office with no further exits, and he tried again. The second door refused to open until he pried at it with all his strength, and then it sparked and slid back into the wall. A vertical shaft dropped below him, stretching out into darkness. He peered down it, noting a ladder mounted in the wall.

The third door opened discretely into a small washroom, which had a mirror. He looked curiously at the face staring back at him. It was pale, dark smudges under the eyes, and topped with a tangle of black hair. He ran his hands through it, watching as the figure in the mirror did the same. His shirt might have been white once, but it was badly singed down one side and torn on the other. The skin under the singed side was faintly red, and when he twisted to peer at where his shirt had been torn, he found a bruise larger than his hand.

"That's nice," he said. It felt like there was something missing, and he found himself pressing a hand against his chest. He frowned at it, but there was nothing helpful forthcoming from the gray fog of no memory. He flattened his hand out, rubbing it against something that wasn't there, and forced it back down to his side. It brushed against a belt slung low across his hips, clearly there for decorative purposes only, and the room around him dissolved into an image of smoke and fire.

"You have to run!" someone said, and he was on his knees, coughing and gagging on the smoke. "Run!" said the voice again, hand on his collar hauling him to his feet. He looked up to see who it was, and the smoke dissolved. He was on his knees in the tiny washroom, clutching the edge of the sink. He pulled himself upright and felt something trickling down his face. He wiped at it with the back of his hand, staring puzzled at the red stain left behind. There was nothing to clean it off his hands with, and he scrubbed them on his dark pants.

He pulled himself to his feet, leaving red smears on the counter, and looked. The mirror showed blood slowly dripping out of his nose, and he wiped at it again. It wouldn't stop and he gave up.

The fourth door led out onto a hallway, partially lit with flickering lights. It only went one direction, and he started down it.

"Where are you?" he hissed as door after door yielded nothing. The hallway wasn't long, barely enough for a few empty rooms full of tables and chairs and broken screens and a single closet full of neatly organized boxes and tools. None of it was anything he recognized, but he wasn't sure of his own mind on that score, so it meant nothing.

The final room had a long wide window in the far wall, the clear barrier heavily reinforced. There were no lights on in the room, but it was lit by an eerie glow from outside. He stepped forward, staring at the subtly distorted field of stars, and something in the back of his mind told him that this was the view from inside a dense nebula. Each visible star had a corona, and the space between them shimmered. He drifted, close to the window, and stared out.

 _Do you know what will happen if they find you?_

The speaker was right next to his ear; he yelled and twisted away, aiming a wild punch at where the speaker's face should have been. There was nothing, and he came up hard against the corner wall. "Who?" he demanded. "Who are they?" He almost thought he heard the sound of faint laughter, and pain spiked, crawling behind his left ear and around the back of his head.

The glow outside the window shifted, rippling in waves that he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt were wrong. He stared them down, and the waves broke against the window in thousands of glittering sparks. The floor shook under his feet, and he growled deep in his throat. Whatever this was, it wasn't going to win.

 _You should hide_ , said the voice that wasn't a voice, and its tone dropped to something deep and oddly playful. _Or hunt them down first._

"I don't have to listen to you," he snarled. "You don't know me."

 _I know you._

That sentence was clear as a bell, ringing against the inside of his skull, tantalizingly familiar. He clutched the sides of his head, and the pain receded. He straightened, looking out at the quiescent glimmer. "You don't know me," he repeated. There were no answers for him here. He stalked back toward the bridge and its ladder downwards.

The ladder was precisely where he'd left it, not that he expected it to be somewhere else. At this point, he just wouldn't have been surprised. He swung out onto the ladder, but as soon as his full weight was on it, the rung under his foot broke free and tumbled downwards. Only his quick reflexes and both hands on the sides of the ladder saved him. He wrapped an arm around it and tested the hold closest to his other hand; it seemed sturdy enough, and he lowered himself carefully downwards.

The next foothold took his weight without protest, and the one after that, but now he didn't trust it. He moved carefully, one limb at a time, until he reached the next level down. The door opened in response to a lever easily within reach, and he looked at it suspiciously.

Instinct told him that the door was safe, but he didn't think his instincts were any more trustworthy than anything else at the moment, and he made a graceful roll and tumble through the center of the door. It remained innocuously open. Eyes narrowed, he unfastened his useless belt and tossed the end of it across the threshold. As soon as it touched deck plate, the door snapped shut too quickly to avoid. He tugged the belt free and looked at the cleanly cut end. It still fit around his waist, although more tightly than before.

"Whoever you are, you're an asshole," he said.

 _I'm hurt that you don't remember me_ , said the voice. _You were everything to me._

It felt wrong. But the door hadn't felt dangerous, and he didn't know what to trust. Images rushed past him again, too quickly to see, settling on a room with wooden floors and pale walls and round windows at regular intervals. The edges of the room were hazy, and he couldn't see what was at either end, but the red pillar in the center was in almost painfully sharp focus. There was a chair below it, dark, just barely teasing the edges of familiarity. He took a careful step toward it.

 _No_ , said the voice, and it rang in his ears. _That is not for you. That was never for you_.

He turned toward the voice, automatically, knowing that nothing would be there, and a pair of far too strong arms folded him against a firm chest. A hand he couldn't see forced his head down onto a dark shoulder, other arm holding his waist like a vise.

"You were never supposed to have that," whispered the voice into one ear. "If it hadn't been for you, nothing would have gone wrong."

He pulled free just enough to get his hands up in front of him and shove the figure backwards. It bounded to its feet, more simian than human, and loped toward him on all fours. He dodged, using its momentum to send it tumbling down the hall, but it just came up on its hind feet and laughed soundlessly. Its jaws opened wide, wider than its head should have accommodated, and he reached for something that wasn't there.

The figure danced into the light, metallic and sharp-edged, silver-gilt from its throat down to the end of its long tail, and it charged toward him. He met it head on, this time, letting himself fall backwards just befor it would have impacted with his chest, and using both legs to kick it away. It flew through the air, impacting against one of the windows and dissolving into dark smoke.

 _Do you want to know what you were?_ It whispered, softly, coming from one side of the room and then the other. _Do you want to know how you came be?_

"I don't want anything from you," he said, but the words refused to leave his tongue. He was looking up at a figure he couldn't quite make out, broader than the first with a gentle hand on between his shoulder blades.

I think this one is for you, said the second figure, and he felt himself tense in fear. The third figure shone brightly enough that he couldn't even look straight at it, a fiery red that left spots and holes in his vision.

It will betray me one day, said the man of fire, and he flinched backwards. The man reached for him, heat flaring out from his fingers, and drew them across his cheeks. But until then, said the man, it is mine.

"That's not how – that's not how it happened," he ground out, forcing the words out of his throat and past his tongue, and found himself curled into a ball on the dusty floor. He hadn't gotten more than halfway to his feet before the voice returned, mocking laughter echoing down the corridor.

 _Of course it is_ , said the voice, wreathed in the chimes of dozens of bells. _This is who you were._

The colors of the walls and floor around him ran like chalk in the rain, dripping over his hands and leaving nothing in their wake. The void crawled up his arms, taking sight but not sensation. He lashed out, slamming a fist against the bulkhead to his side, and staggered when it met nothing.

"Hey, hey, no need to get that upset," said a voice that was simultaneously familiar and like nothing he'd ever heard. Firm hands hauled him upright again, and he blinked. After the first few times, his vision cleared to show him a concerned face. The man in front of him – at least, he thought it was a man, although he was weirdly pretty for a male – peered into his eyes before drawing back. "I mean, yes, but not yet, okay?"

"What?" he said. He had no idea what this person was talking about. "Who are you?"

"Oh, sweetie," the man said, reaching toward his face. He flinched away, but the man took his chin in a firm grasp with one hand and carefully ran dexterous fingers through his hair with the other until he found what he was looking for. Pain flared under the probing fingers just above his left ear when the spot was touched, and he flinched away. "I shouldn't have startled you. Come on, let's go get this looked at."

"I don't –" he started, and then had to swallow hard. When he could breathe again, he felt frozen. Trying to push away the other man's hand got him nowhere, not even a finger twitch, and he couldn't so much as flinch when he heard his voice, higher than he thought it should be and shaky. "Basco?"

"Oh, you know who I am after all," the man – Basco – said, relief evident in his face. "I still think you should get that bump checked."

"I'm fine," he heard himself say, and felt himself knock Basco's hand aside without any conscious effort. "You're the one who's crazy."

Basco's eyes dropped at that, and he fiddled with the hem of what looked like a ludicrous green shirt. It hung on him loosely, much like the reddish pants underneath it, belted in place tightly at the waist. The whole ensemble was topped with a ridiculous bright red headband with long trailing ends hanging over Basco's shoulders. As bizarre as it was, seeing it gave him an equal measure of reassurance and fury. "I'm telling you the truth," Basco said, hesitantly.

"I don't believe you," he heard himself say, but he also heard the desperation in his own voice.

"He's _from Earth_ ," Basco hissed, glancing around.

For the first time, he saw their surroundings. They were surrounded by bright and steady stars, directly below a dark flag with an emblem he couldn't make out that waved lazily in a breeze he couldn't feel. The bright red walls around them barely came up to more than waist height, and the sight resolved itself into a bucket-like shape built onto a thick red post. Without being able to look, he knew there was a trapdoor in the floor leading to a ladder carved into the post – _the mast_ , he corrected himself, although there was a distant feel to the phrase.

"You know what that means, right?" Basco continued, apparently having satisfied himself that whatever he was looking for wasn't there.

"So what?" Hearing his own voice was eerie when he wasn't the one using it.

"You know where they come from, right?" Basco was looking at him in disbelief. "They're from Earth, too. They all came from Earth. The keys, the great power, all of it. All of it from that insignificant little mudball."

"Not that insignificant, if the Zangyack tried so hard to wipe it out," he heard himself drawl. "And failed."

"You're missing the point," Basco said.

He could feel two sets of conflicting sensations; he could feel his own confusion and the unrelenting surreality of his body carrying on a conversation without him, and he could feel the apprehension making whoever was driving his body's palms sweat and the tension that knotted up his stomach. He could feel the effort it was taking to keep his face smooth. "We should _talk_ ," he heard his voice say, and Basco threw up his hands and dramatically turned away.

"He's been lying to us," Basco said, keeping his voice low, "and you want to talk? He's not collecting them to get to the greatest treasure, he's doing it so he can return them to his home."

"I…" he heard himself say, and felt his fingers uncurl. His eyes dropped to the floor, just as red as the rest of the structure, and then rose to meet Basco's. "So what do you want to do about it?"

"He's a traitor," Basco said. "He betrayed us, and we can't let that stand."

The impressions got muddy, after that; he felt time passing, and heard muffled bits and pieces of conversations with Basco and with the alleged traitor who'd used the two of them to collect something valuable under false pretenses with the intention of selling them out at the last moment. Some of the names seemed familiar – Zangyack was an empire, far-reaching and holding untold stars in its grasp – but the rest meant nothing to him.

He knew Basco was talking to someone else, someone besides him, and knew that Basco wouldn't tell him who it was. Basco just told him to be patient, and that when Basco signaled, he just needed to follow the plan and everything would be all right. He didn't know how much time it took, until all of Basco's ducks lined up in a row – and where had that expression come from? He didn't even know what a duck _was_ – and he felt the vibrations of unfamiliar boots on the decks.

The silver-gray figures flooding through the door didn't look familiar to him, but he could feel the pit open up in his body's stomach. Whoever was driving it recognized the troopers, as well as the blue figure directing them from the background. "Basco!" he heard himself shout, and he ran forward.

Something hit him hard on the side of the head, and he tumbled to the ground. The staff that had hit him reversed itself, the handle hollow, and he had just the briefest moment to recognize it as the barrel of a gun before light and sound flared together and something buried itself in his shoulder. It would have hit in dead center in the chest if he hadn't flinched to the side at precisely the right moment.

"Stop!" he heard Basco say, but he didn't know if Basco was talking to him or to the enemy troopers, and then he was being told to run. He screamed at whoever was driving his body to stay and fight, sort this mess out – surely that wasn't how Basco wanted to handle the traitor? By killing him and taking his ship? – but he wasn't in control, and he fled, boots slipping in his own blood.

Later, after another blurry rush of garbled perception, he found himself sneaking back onto the ship and clutching a heavy box. It rattled when he moved it too quickly, and he set it down carefully. Basco was waiting for him, in the dark.

"I told you to – I told you to follow the plan," Basco said. "No one had to get hurt."

"Get off my ship," he heard himself say, and felt his hand aim a pistol he hadn't known he was holding.

"The Zangyack were the only way," Basco said, a note of pleading in his voice. Pleading for understanding or mercy, he didn't know. "I just needed to use them to get him out, and then the two of us could have run together. We would have had the greatest treasure."

"I'm not going to say it again." There was a note in his voice he didn't like, an ugly tone that he shied away from. "For the second and last time, get off my ship."

"I did this for us," Basco said, but he was moving toward the door.

The pistol didn't come down until he knew Basco was gone, until he'd unmoored the ship and gotten it out of reach of any pursuers through the simple application of the element of surprise. Through it all, he felt a sense of deep satisfaction in the mind driving his body that was completely at odds with how he felt watching the scene.

"I didn't betray my – my friends," he tried to say, but the words wouldn't come. He couldn't so much as blink as he watched his body – his past self – set a course and caress the top of the box in an obscenely possessive gesture.

"You're mine now," he heard his past self say. "Nothing is going to change that."

He dropped into the corridor again, landing hard on his hands and knees, and took in a deep breath. His body was under his control again, and he used the wall to drag himself to his feet. "That's not true," he said. "None of that is true." A sinking feeling in his stomach wouldn't let him say the words with anything resembling conviction; he had no idea who he was, or what he might have done.

There were other people on this ship. He was going to hunt them down and make them give him answers, no matter what it took. The thought was all too close to his past self, and he smashed it into submission. He was going to get answers, and he wasn't going to damage anyone who didn't have it coming. That made him feel a little better, and he moved carefully down the hall.

The second deck turned out to be just as big a disappointment as the first, with doors that refused to open and those that did full of nothing but empty furniture and darkened screens. He wiped absently at the slow trickle still leaking out of his nose, and grimaced at the red staining his fingers again. He wished he could remember what else had been on the screens where he'd seen the other inhabitants of the vessel, but the only image he remembered clearly was the array of pods, and he had no idea where that might be.

"One down," he said, reaching the end of the deck. "So many more to go." A nice, handy access shaft was marked, and he smashed the door with a chair he'd dragged out of one of the empty rooms for that specific purpose. The door sparked and slid open. "Oh, look, you're not a trap." He grinned fiercely, and climbed down to the next level.

The third deck was crawling with spiders; they spilled into the shaft when he pried open the door, swarming across the ledge with no regard for the drop and tumbling into the shadows below. He looked at them for a long moment as they skittered across the floor, brown and red and black with the occasional flash of poisonous yellow and verdant green. A few were as large as his hand with his fingers outstretched, but most of them were smaller than his smallest fingernail. He waited for the flow to abate, but it just kept coming.

He stepped onto the deck without testing the door, feeling chitinous shells and legs crunching under his boots, and then cursed when he realized what he'd done. This door wasn't set to cause him harm, though. Prickling on his legs caught his attention, and he looked down to see that the spiders had started crawling upwards while he wasn't paying attention. The largest specimens he'd seen yet were frozen just below his knees, four symmetrical sets of eyes gleaming in the overhead lights.

"Get off of me," he said, and tried to brush them away, but they'd hooked their feet into his pants. He stepped backwards, missing the open hatch by bare millimeters and bouncing off the doorframe. The impact seemed to shake the spiders loose, but instead of falling they only climbed higher. He batted at them again, walking and then running down the corridor until he tripped over something he couldn't see. He rolled to the side instinctively and came up holding a garish red pistol. It hadn't been in his pockets, he was sure of that, or maybe it had been.

He remembered seeing something red.

Wet sludge seeped through his pants, and he looked down to see that he'd crushed most of the spiders when he'd fallen. One had been thrown free, and it made a mad rush toward the wall, weaving back and forth on seven legs instead of eight. He took careful aim and fired the pistol, the unerring shot catching the spider in its abdomen and spattering its guts out over the bulkheads.

A shower of sparks erupted from the wall, and the remains of the spider started to burn. The flames spread downward, and he backed away. Liquid words washed across his ears, nothing that he understood, and he tripped over his own feet to ricochet off another wall. Steam hissed down over the flames, damping them down, making him choke and gag until he stumbled out of the edges of the spray. His lungs ached as he gasped for air that came back little by little.

The same liquid speech flowed past him again, the sound seeming to slowly shut off the fire-suppressing steam. He leaned against the nearest wall, bracing himself with his free hand, and just breathed. The stillness at his feet seemed wrong, but he didn't know why. _The fire is real, the spiders are not_ , said the voice, but it sounded wrong, too. There weren't any – he shook his head, suddenly sure that the floor was crawling with vermin, but there was nothing but the same dust that spilled out of his hair and settled over his clothes.

"How long have I been here?" he demanded, but the voice didn't answer. The corridor was silent around him. He had a pistol in his hand, colored a garish red and garnished with an eye-searing blue. It was warm to the touch, as if he'd been holding it long enough for his body heat to seep into it. He stuffed it in his belt and looked around. He'd been looking for something – no, he'd been looking for someone.

Images flashed behind his eyes, too quickly to make out, leaving him with vague impressions of forms and faces. The clearest – he remembered the clearest, dark curled hair held back by a red headband and a smile that somehow slid from warm to mocking without shifting by a millimeter. There was a name attached to it, but it slid away and left him with nothing but the bitter sense of betrayal and the certainty that he'd made a grave error that could never be rectified.

 _I did this for us_ , he heard.

"You're wrong," he snarled. Whatever he thought he was remembering, it was wrong. He tried to hold on to the knowledge, but it slipped away with the memories and left him wondering what it was that he was trying to recall. "You're wrong," he said again, unsure why.

Just beyond the spray of dust was an open hatch, leading to a vertical access shaft. He rubbed at his eyes, feeling as though he'd been there before but unable to place the memory. It oozed back, sliding into place in his brain. He'd just come out of that door, he'd climbed to this deck looking for someone, and then there had been – there had been something, something that accounted for the lingering burn in his chest and the scraping sensation in his throat.

"I'm going to find you," he said, feeling the rightness of that statement lock into place. There was more than one, there were – there was a group, people that he had – he shook his head again. "Answers," he said. "I'm looking for answers."

The corridors were silent and echoing, his footsteps bouncing off the bulkheads and multiplying in his ears, but the only feet making noise were his. He kept walking in the same direction, past the open hatch, pushing open doors and listening for the sound of someone else's heartbeat. He couldn't hear his own.

 _Do you know where you are now?_ The voice wound deeper than hearing, tendrils seeping into his mind.

"I'm walking through an empty hallway, looking for people who might or might not exist," he growled at it, waving a hand past his ear as if he could shove the speaker away.

 _I can show you where you are_ , the voice continued, undeterred. He ignored it, grasping a reluctant door at its center seam and pushing it into the wall with both hands. He stepped through it, staggering when the floor was lower than he was expecting, nearly pitching forward and catching himself at the last second. He wasn't quick enough to avoid stumbling into the figure in a yellow jacket standing right in front of him, but instead of pushing her forward, he found himself occupying the same space. She didn't seem to notice.

He backed up, carefully, more than a little nauseated by the visualization of his body sliding out of her back with absolutely no physical sensation to match. She had her arms folded, staring at a woman wearing pink lacy skirts. "This isn't right," she was saying.

"But isn't your suggestion going a little too far?" the woman in pink said, hands folded at her waist. She looked demure on the surface, but anyone who thought she was meek and pliable was in for a surprise. He could tell. Neither of these women were likely to back down from anything. He didn't know how he knew that, but he was as sure of it as he was sure of the fact that he was breathing.

"Maybe getting us all killed is going a little too far," said the woman in yellow. He looked around, to see that he'd stepped through the door into yet another corridor, but the door behind him was gone. Wires hung from the ceiling, sparking, and emergency lights flashed red along the floor. The two women were the only people in his field of vision, but they were speaking quietly enough that he thought there must be someone else around, someone they didn't want to overhear.

"We could just leave," the woman in pink suggested.

"You think he would just let us go?" the woman in yellow said bitterly. "After the last three years? No. We know too much."

"I don't think you're wrong," said the woman in pink, eyes downcast. "But there has to be another way."

"There isn't, and we both know that," said the woman in yellow. She stepped forward, putting her arms around the woman in pink. The woman in pink returned the embrace, pressing herself against the woman in yellow in a gesture that bore the familiarity of long acquaintance. Their body language was exactly the way he knew it was supposed to be, but it only served to highlight the wrongness of their words.

"This isn't you," he said helplessly, but they couldn't or wouldn't hear him. He tried to make them see him, but he could have been invisible for all the notice they took. As far as he knew, he thought, he was invisible. "This isn't you!" he said again. He didn't know how or where the knowledge had come from, but he was more willing to trust it than he was in the mysterious voice.

"We can't tell -," said the woman in pink, forehead tucked against the the other woman's neck. She'd said a name, he was sure of it, but he couldn't hear it.

"No," said the woman in yellow after a short pause. "He's going to have to think it's an accident."

"What about –" the woman in pink started, but before he could hear what else she said, the floor lost its cohesion and he fell. He landed, hard, tangled in wires and support struts, stuck underneath a row of flat, rectangular surfaces that were solid and unyielding despite his having fallen through them a fraction of a second before. Cold sweat dripped in his eyes as he fought his way free, ripping away the wires entangling his limbs until he could stand.

The room was cold and looked sterile, white on all six sides with an array of burnished silver pods in the middle. They were all closed, and he stepped around the end of the array closest to him to see it from the front. Seven of the eight were obviously unoccupied, inert with blank surfaces. The second one from the end, within arm's reach, hummed with an obscene approximation of life. Blue and green lights danced across its surface, slowly shifting to orange and red as he watched until the entire sequence was nothing but red, red, and more red.

"I don't know what you want," he said to the voice. The nearest pod was solid to the touch, and he tried experimentally to lift the lid on the second pod. It stayed stubbornly shut. His arms looked odd, vanishing against the lit-up display, and he noticed that he was wearing a knee-length red coat. He hadn't been wearing it before, he was sure, but the detail was lost in the face of the door in the wall opposite him opening to let four people pile into the room.

The woman in yellow led the way, followed by a man in a silver jacket and another man wearing dark green. The woman in pink lace brought up the rear. "We're not too late," said the man in silver, his expressive face set in a mask of determination. "That's not how it works. All we have to do is get it open."

"It's done," said the woman in pink, her voice gentle on the surface but hard underneath. The man in silver either didn't hear the hardness or he didn't care, because he shook his head in denial.

"I won't believe it," he said.

"He's already gone," the woman in yellow said, and she was openly angry. "He's dead because we came here."

The man in green glanced uncertainly at the woman in pink, looking like nothing so much as a lost baby animal; his fluffy pale hair only cemented the effect. The initial lost expression made his next words all the more incongruous. "This shouldn't have happened," he said, not a statement of denial but one of firm intent.

"I just can't…" The man in silver backed up, bumping into the open doorway and then fleeing through it. The other three drew closer together, the woman in yellow positioning herself to keep a watchful eye on the door. She spoke quietly, and he could hear every word although he knew her voice didn't carry any farther than the three people standing by the door.

"This might –" She bit her lip. "I hate to say it, but this might not be such a bad thing."

"He would have sided with the captain," said the man in green, glancing toward the door. "And he would have been – this might be our only chance to break free."

"Break free of what?" he said, striding toward the group, or trying to. He tripped over the corner of the pod closest to the wall, and by the time he'd gotten his balance back, the three of them had filed out of the room. "I don't know who these people are!" He spun around, searching the walls, the ceiling, anything for some sign of the voice leading him through a maze of people he didn't know talking about something that had no bearing on him at all.

The sensation that he was forgetting something important slowly pressed itself against his conscious mind, and he shook his head to dislodge it. He knew he was forgetting something. He didn't know his own name. But there was something else, something just below the surface, something that he absolutely needed to drag into the light. He reached for it, and the dull headache behind his eyes blossomed into piercingly bright agony. He kept reaching, until he could feel nothing else.

The deck was cool beneath his cheek when he opened his eyes, and he felt an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. How that worked when he couldn't remember anything more than the past few hours, he had no idea, but he pushed himself carefully to his feet. He'd seen – he'd seen something. He'd seen people he should have known, he knew, and clung to that knowledge. He'd seen familiar faces, even if he couldn't place them, even if he couldn't say now what they might have looked like.

 _I am not alone_ , he thought.

Another impression settled slowly into conscious thought; the idea that there was a budding mutiny. _They're planning something_ , he heard, so faintly that it was nearly inaudible, and he shook his head. Dreaming, he thought he'd been dreaming, but the assertion rang hollow.

He was still searching for someone, he knew that much. Even if he didn't know who he was, or how he'd gotten there, or where he was, he knew he was looking for someone. He wasn't going to find them in an empty room, and so he returned to the corridor outside. It was just as empty. He walked down it, choosing another door at random. It opened into a starry field. He froze briefly, until he saw the ceiling and the floor and the faint reflection on whatever translucent material made up the outer wall.

"I'm on a ship," he murmured, and remembered waking up on a ship's bridge. "I've been on a ship."

Being on a space-borne vessel didn't seem like the sort of thing he should have forgotten, not so quickly. The mental image of a hallway full of spiders flashed through his mind, and he looked downward reflexively, but the floor was quiescent beneath his boots.

"Don't be ridiculous," he said, and saw flashing lights in the field of stars. There were five, each blinking in its own pattern. They cascaded together, sometimes synching up in a beautiful rhythm and sometimes seeming utterly disparate. He stood and stared for a long moment, until the last light winked out and he wondered what he'd been looking at.

He took a step forward, and the stars rushed toward him. He wasn't standing in a freighter – why did he think he'd been aboard a freighter? – but in a sharp-edged gray corridor. _This is what you wrought_ , said the voice, _and this is the path you have chosen_. He turned, but there was no one near him. His footsteps faltered; he'd been going somewhere, but he couldn't remember where, for all that he'd been walking with purpose only seconds before.

Something heavy hung around his neck, and he pulled at it. Electrical current jolted across his fingers, but he'd seen that sort of thing before. He pulled harder, trying to break it to pieces, until the shock drove him to his knees and left his hands numb and shaking. The corridor wavered, fading into an organic beige before snapping back to the utilitarian gray, and he pulled at the collar again.

The beige spread across the ceiling, and he landed on a wooden floor. It was warped, and when he looked up, he saw it had split jaggedly in half. The section on which he stood was more or less level, but the other side of the room was sharply tilted, and there was a jumble of furniture wedged into the gap where the floor joined the wall.

He reached up toward his neck, but whatever he was looking for wasn't there. He picked his way carefully across the floor, toward the round windows. They showed him a frozen ocean, and even though he couldn't feel the cold, he could see his breath crystallize in the air. Two moons were visible, low in the sky, the light they cast almost bright enough to pass for daylight. He turned away from the window, and saw flickering yellow illumination for the first time.

The warm light outlined what he could now see was a door, angled downward along with the broken floor. He climbed across the gap, seeing the ice in the bottom, and cursed as a sharp point pierced his finger. He slid carefully down the floor, catching himself on the doorframe and peered through it and down. The room had been a kitchen at some point, and now it was burning. Smoldering might have been a better word; the fire had almost burned itself out.

He leaned in farther, not sure whether to see if there was anything worth looking at in the rubble, not sure what had happened or how, but there was a knot in his stomach that was growing by the moment. It hurt, twisting his insides around, and he didn't know why.

"Just do it," someone said, and he almost recognized the face barely visible in the uneven light. Whoever it was had taken shelter in a broken section of the wall, and he or she had wrapped arms around knees drawn up to chest as it to take up as little space as possible.

"Do what?" he asked.

"Finish it!" The words were half a scream, and he raised his hand to see a blade in it. It was darkened from just below the hilt to the tip, and he was momentarily disgusted that someone had used it without cleaning it properly. "You started it, now finish it!"

"I didn't –" he started, but the figure darted forward. He dodged, instinctively, and the ground was solidly horizontal under his feet. He was standing in an empty corridor, hands holding nothing. He rubbed his eyes, but search as he might, the broken ship was gone. The knot in his stomach remained. Uneasy, he moved away from the room with the translucent wall.

There was an open hatch in the hall, and he leaned carefully through it. A ladder was built into the shaft, which was just wide enough for a large man to fit through. He swung out onto the ladder and climbed carefully to the top. A few of the rungs were missing.

The door at the top of the ladder was stuck, but he kicked it out of the groove and across the hall without much difficulty. The short corridor led him to a bridge, and he stopped short when he walked through its doors. "I've _been here_ ," he said. There were screens on the wall opposite him, mostly full of static but a few still operating. One showed the same array of silver pods he'd seen in what might have been a dream, and he remembered seeing it before.

Another showed a man with fluffy hair in a dark green coat, emerging from a hatch. He knew it was on a lower deck without knowing how he knew, and then the man's face was clearly visible on the screen for barely half a second. He felt a wave of affection coupled with apprehension and wariness, and a stomach-wrenching sense of betrayal. He tore his eyes away from the man in green.

Two women, one in pink and one in yellow, flanked a man in the tattered remnants of a silver jacket. The man was obviously injured, the two women all but radiating protectiveness as they moved down a corridor. They were watching for something, and the lights in the corridor went out. He'd seen their faces, though, just briefly enough that he felt a fierce sense of possessiveness toward all of them and the same sense of betrayal.

"No," he said, but he didn't know if he was repudiating the possibility of treason or the knowledge that it had happened. He backed into the corridor, away from the screens, not wanting to see anything else.

 _If you didn't like that future,_ said the voice, _I can show you another._ The corridor dissolved, dripping into his eyes until they burned, and he screamed.

From one moment to the next, the world wrenched sickeningly, and he felt an almost entirely unfamiliar sensation in his guts. He twisted to the side as the nausea peaked, vomiting helplessly as the cramps took hold of his guts and forced them in directions they'd never intended to go. He would have fallen, when it was finished, if not for a careful hand propping up his shoulder.

"Here." The voice was soft and feminine, and came with a proffered glass of clear liquid. It turned out to be water, to rinse his mouth. He spit into the extremely well placed basin on the floor, and nearly dropped the glass when his hand started shaking. A delicate hand, with nails lacquered dark red, took the glass away and set it somewhere out of his sight. The basin vanished, and he fell back with a groan, squeezing his eyes shut.

"It's not working," said someone else, voice almost too low to hear.

"Of course it's not working," said a third voice, sharper than the first two and high enough that he thought it belonged to a woman. "He needs a higher dose."

"He's not going to keep it down," said the second voice.

He forced his eyes open, just enough to see the three people standing in a tight-knit huddle less than a meter away from him. If they thought they couldn't hear him, they were all crazy. He pushed himself upward, tumbling off whatever he'd been lying on and landing more or less upright, or at least vertically oriented. All three of turned to him with identical expressions of guilty dismay. He stepped backwards, forcing his legs straight against the wet-cement feel of his guts, keeping a wary eye on all of them.

The woman in pink stepped forward, the one with the woman's voice who'd spoken first. Her features twisted, eyes darkening into solid pits of black and teeth sharpening as she held out a placating hand and affected a concerned expression. "You should sit down," she said.

He shook his head. They'd poisoned him. They'd all poisoned him and now that he wasn't dying as quickly as they'd wanted, they were going to try again. The woman in pink spoke again, but he couldn't hear her against the white noise crashing through his ears. He took another step back, and his foot landed on air instead of solid ground. He fell backwards, bouncing off a row of something sharp until he fetched up at the bottom, back solidly on the ground.

The ceiling looked different. He blinked at it, looking up at flickering lights against faded beige bulkheads. The only thing that hurt was his head, a solid knot of pain pulsing above his left ear, and the heavy sensation that had wound its way through his abdomen was gone. He sat up, slowly, and looked around. The short corridor, he'd seen it before. He'd been through it before.

The door that wasn't closing because his feet were in the way was the bridge. He'd woken up before on the bridge, and he'd seen the people who were trying to kill him. He pulled himself up with help from the door frame, willing the little starburst-explosions of pain behind his eyes to go away. He had to find them all first, that was it. He had to find the people who wanted him dead and… he didn't know what.

There was a lift door visible from where he was standing, and he stepped into it. He didn't know quite where the others were, but they couldn't be far. At least one person was in the same section of the ship he was in; he questioned the certainty with which he knew where one of the people in question might be, and the knowledge that he was on a ship, and then let it go.

The lift took him downwards without the sense of movement, simply the door opening onto a different hallway than the one he'd walked out of. He didn't remember choosing a deck, but he strode forward confidently. There was something missing, something that should have brushed against his hands. It didn't matter. There was someone not that far away, someone walking through the corridor with a cautious tread.

He didn't want to be seen. He darted along the corridor, through the open doorway at the dead end and into the back of the room. He needed to see what he was up against. He needed to know that the individual he planned on eliminating was actually a threat. There was another ladder – how many had been built into this freighter, he thought distantly – and he swarmed up it and into the ceiling. There was an entire duty station, covered in script that he couldn't read, but more importantly, he could see through the gaps in its floor to the room below.

A man wearing a torn green jacket slipped into the room, clearly looking around for something. His jacket hung oddly, heavier on one side than the other, but he clearly had something bulky in both pockets. The man in green looked around the room, hair fluttering with his movements, and made straight for a panel on the wall.

"You're mine," he whispered, pressing a hand against his heart. It ached sharply, a storm of emotion he couldn't identify swirling around when the man had looked in his direction and he'd seen the man's face. His boot caught the edge of the walkway, dislodging one of the screening tiles, and it tumbled downwards. The man in green startled, peering at the fallen panel, and he held as still as he could.

The man in green moved toward him, hands spread just a little out to the side, but at no point did he make a move toward either of the weapons in his pockets. After a moment, the man in green returned to the panel in the wall, brushing aside a spring-loaded trap. There was almost nothing in the compartment, and the man in green left with a disappointed expression, casting one final glance over his shoulder.

"You're mine," he said again, but he'd seen the man conspiring to kill him. Or he'd dreamed – or there had been something. He didn't know what he'd seen.

 _They're going to betray you_ , said the voice. _The same way you betrayed me._

"You're lying," he choked. "You're lying."

He trusted the man in the green jacket, he knew that beyond a shadow of a doubt. He just didn't trust himself to remember that.

 _Everyone's going to leave you, in the end_ , the voice said, whispering, intimate and invasive. _They're all going to leave you, because you've brought them nothing but pain_.

"That's not true." He curled in on himself, pulling his knees against his chest. "That's not true."

The voice kept whispering, kept telling him how it was all going to go wrong, how the pain and suffering he had wrought would come around full circle and visit itself upon him tenfold, its vehicle those he had thought he could trust. He covered his ears with his hands, but it didn't help. The voice refused to stop.

His hands shook as he crawled back down the ladder, and halfway down he had to stop and cling to it until he felt strong enough to not lose his grip. The deck tilted under his feet for a moment when he landed on it, giving him the brief but intense expectation of seeing ocean waves outside one of the few windows. "I am in space," he said, and made his way toward the open door.

The corridors still all looked the same, but there was an echo to his footsteps that hadn't been there before, an overlay to the voice still whispering betrayal in his ears that blurred its words together. He was nearly on top of the group of people all but marching through the hallways before he realized he was hearing something undeniably real.

They walked right past him, failing to see him hidden in the alcove he'd ducked into just barely in time. The two women were almost perfect matches to the faces he'd seen, or dreamed, or been shown; one was hovering worriedly at the man's side, but the man didn't seem to need the help despite the bloody mask down one side of his face he'd obviously tried more than once to wipe away.

Their words resolved from unintelligible babbling into something he understood as they started to move farther away.

"…we're going to have to try the lift," someone was saying.

"I told you," the man said, sounding impatient.

"You nearly fell off the ladder just trying to get onto it," said the woman in yellow. She had an edge to her voice. He liked it, until he heard the memory of the same voice saying that he needed a higher dose. Before he had made a decision about what he was going, he stepped into plain sight and pulled the weapon out of his belt. He fired, aiming for the woman in yellow, but his hands were shaking so badly that he missed entirely.

The three of them spun around at the noise, each of their eyes widening in shock. The man got his voice back first, face split into a huge grin. "Marvelous!" The grin slid off his face abruptly as he saw the weapon pointed however unsteadily in his direction.

"Marvelous," said the woman in yellow. Her tights were ripped and her jacket was torn. He tracked the smear of dark fluid over one cheek as she spoke. "Marvelous, put that down."

The woman in pink stepped carefully forward. Her lacy skirts hung askew, and her hair was tangled. It didn't seem right that her hair was tangled. His hand sank downwards, just a little. "Marvelous," she said, as though the word should mean something to him. Her hands were where he could see them, and he kep his eyes moving between the three of them.

She was the biggest threat, the one moving toward him with open arms, but he felt the same flood of protective emotion he'd felt for the man in the green jacket. It stabbed into his heart, and he pressed at the source of the pain. She was a threat, and she was safe, and she was _his_.

"Marvelous," she said again, moving closer ever so slowly. _Why_ did she keep saying that?

He couldn't do it. He didn't know what he couldn't do. He opened his hand against the reflexive tightening on the trigger, all but flinging the pistol at the woman in pink, and fled. The walls and floor tripped him up, but he couldn't stand there with the voice screaming at him to pull the trigger and something just as strong telling him that everything was fine now that he'd found his crew.

 _They're hunting you_ , said the voice, and he screamed at it to shut up. The lift doors were right in front of him and he stumbled through them. They closed on the woman in yellow racing toward him, both hands clenched into fists, and whisked him upward. He all but fell out of the doors as soon as they opened on another corridor. The lights flickered overhead, and he didn't know if it was the freighter or his eyes.

 _Why are you running_ , the voice asked, full of contempt. _The Marvelous I know doesn't run from anything._

"I don't know what that word means!" He pounded a fist into the wall, feeling it dent under the blow, and pulled a bleeding hand back. He punched it again, and again, until the warped panel fell onto the deck with a deafening thud. Sparks flickered in the empty space left behind.

"Marvelous," said yet another voice behind him, but there was no weapon in his hand when he turned around.

The man in the dark green jacket was standing halfway down the hall, wearing the same expression of shock, hand outstretched. His jacket still hung entirely wrong. Behind him stood someone taller, long dark hair gathered back and away from his face, wearing blue. He remembered the blue jacket, remembered handing it to… to….

The man wearing blue just stared at him, lips pressed together.

"Why can't you all just go away?" The panel on the floor was light enough to hurl toward the two men, and he didn't stay to see what happened when it hit. The ache in his chest and the stabbing pain in his head spread out to meet each other, pulsing in time with his heartbeat. The mix of security undercut with betrayal wouldn't let him move in any direction except away.

 _Stop them before they stop you_ , said the voice, and he fell to his knees.

"Stop it, stop it, stop it!" He clutched at his ears, trying to make it stop, but it just kept whispering and laughing, and then he felt something brush against his fingertips.

There was something embedded in his skin, above and behind his left ear.

He pulled at it, and it clung to his bones. He pulled at it, and the pain nearly drove him into unconsciousness. He pulled at it, and it tore free, a long filament dripping with clear fluid slithering out. He hunched over, panting, staring at the jagged piece of metal in his hand.

"Marvelous," said a soft voice, and he turned carefully to see the man in the green jacket standing just out of arm's reach. "Let me have that."

He closed his fingers over it, feeling the metal bite into his palm, and used the wall to lever himself to his feet. His head felt like it might come off if he moved it in the wrong direction, but he lifted his chin and stared down at the man in green. The man in green actually fell back half a step before his expression firmed.

"Marvelous," he said again, sounding both long-suffering and patient. "I need to know what that is."

"I know who you are," he said, narrowing his eyes. The face was familiar, the body language, the tone of voice, all of it, but it slipped away before he could grasp it.

"Joe," said the man in green, and he recognized that as a name. He knew it belonged to the man in the blue jacket even before Joe stepped out from behind the man in green. "We have a problem."

Joe peered into his face, and he smirked at the scrutiny. "Do you know who I am?" Joe asked.

"Joe," he said. "Joe Gibken." The second name slotted into place neatly, and he was inordinately pleased. Nothing came to him beyond the name, though, and Joe frowned when he didn't say anything else.

"Do you know who he is?" Joe pointed.

He shook his head, slowly, trying to keep it on his shoulders where it belonged, and the man in green's face fell. He felt an absurd urge to tell him that everything was going to be fine, and stuffed it back into the dark where it belonged.

"Do you know what your name is?" Joe pressed.

"No," he said hoarsely. "I don't…" His voice failed, and he dragged it back. "I don't remember anything."

"Your name is Marvelous," Joe said. "And I need you to give that to the doc over there and come with me. This ship isn't safe."

"My ship," he said, because that piece had come back to him. He had a ship.

"The Gokai Galleon," Joe said. "This isn't the Galleon, and we have to go."

He didn't like being told what to do, no matter what feelings welled up in his chest when he looked at Joe, and whether or not he was actually standing on his ship, he wasn't going to stand for being ordered around.

"Marvelous, _please_ ," Joe said, and that made it a request. He could grant a request. He held out the implant toward the doc, dropping it into the other man's hand with a sense of dignity.

"Thank you," said the doc. He wrapped up the device in a handkerchief that seemed to have come out of nowhere with zero regard for the fluids coating it and put it in one of his apparently numerous pockets.

"We can use the Galleon to find the others," Joe said. "And then we're going to –"

"Cannons," Marvelous said. "We have cannons."

Joe choked, his face draining of color for a few brief seconds before he recovered. "Yes," he said.

"They're three decks down," Marvelous said. His tongue felt thick, the words hard to form properly. "Saw them when I got off the lift."

Joe and the doc exchanged glances.

"Don't talk about me like I'm not here," Marvelous snapped, and pointed at the doc. "You go find the rest of the crew." He glared at Joe. "You can play mother hen and show me where my ship is."

"Aye, aye, captain," Joe said after a pause.

The moment was spoiled when Marvelous couldn't stand upright – or at all – without either Joe or the wall propping him upright, but he took it as a win anyway.

His memory of the next few minutes would never be particularly clear; he saw the doc's back vanish down the hallway, and there was a brief impression of a starry field before Joe half-carried him down a flight of stairs and he knew that he was home. Joe tried to steer him toward a couch along one wall, but that wasn't where he belonged. He sat in what he knew was his chair and refused to be budged out of it.

Joe threw up his hands in frustration and left him there. Marvelous gripped the arms of the chair, pushing back the encroaching fog that wanted to swallow him whole. He couldn't let go, not quite yet. The rest of the crew, led by the doc, came down the same set of stairs and filed around to his right. The woman in the yellow jacket deposited the other man – Gai, something in his mind said – on the couch that Marvelous had refused, and took a long hard look at both Marvelous and Joe.

"Doc," she said. "Can you fix it?"

The doc – or apparently his name was Doc – was at a console, poking around at its innards. "Give me a minute," he said.

The five people in front of him were his entire crew, and the knowledge that they were all on board and safe loosened something in his chest and made it just a little harder to keep the fog at bay. Marvelous stared at Doc, ignoring the rest of them, while Doc looked back and forth between a display full of letters and numbers that impossibly made Marvelous' head hurt worse and the inside of the control station. Doc finally pressed a red button inside the station, and the ship around them hummed to life.

One more step down, and Marvelous was holding the arms of the chair so tightly that his knuckles were white.

"Blow it up, Doc," he said, and Doc jumped.

The freighter fell away from the Galleon, and he heard the thunder of cannons. There was an incredibly brief orange flash as the atmosphere inside the freighter burned and the rest of it crumpled in on itself before its reactor exploded into white brilliance. The Galleon rocked backward in the shock wave, riding it out with ease.

Marvelous grinned at it, and let go of his chair. He felt himself tipping sideways, but the fog descended so suddenly that if he hit the ground, he didn't feel it.


	15. All Your Fault

Awareness returned in bits and pieces, sound and voice echoing around him and the sensation of pressure along his body. It faded in and out, and slowly some of the words began to make sense.

"…Galleon's been cleaned out. All of the weird code is gone. Navi's even back online and not broadcasting that annoying sound anymore; that's why everyone was so cranky all the time, the incessant noise." The voice belonged to Doc, and he was close enough to touch, if Marvelous could just move his hand. "We're ready to move out whenever you are."

Doc kept talking, telling him about the work it had taken to clear out and repair the Galleon's operating system, but that at least none of the damage had been physical or structural.

"We just had to replace a few relays," he said, and went on to explain how Joe refused to let any of the station personnel aboard the Galleon to assist.

 _Station_? Marvelous wanted to ask, but Doc's voice scattered into pieces and he lost the thread.

"If my ribs heal before your head does, I'm going to laugh at you forever." The voice belonged to Gai. He remembered Gai. "My head's already fine, so I win that one, but you're kind of freaking everyone else out here. I think," there was a rustling sound, and Gai's voice got nearer and dropped in volume, "that it's the not knowing who everyone was that bugged them, you know? Also that you shot at Luka. Even if you didn't know who she was at the time."

Gai shifted away again, and Marvelous felt something touch his fingers. Gai was _holding his hand_ , and that was just insulting. It was also endearing, for some definition of the word, but Gai shied away from physical contact with all of them and then had the temerity to hold Marvelous' hand while he was essentially unconscious? He tried to tell Gai exactly what he thought of that, but the effort drove him back underneath the waiting fog.

It felt like time had passed when he surfaced enough to hear another voice. This time it belonged to Joe, and he was giving Marvelous a status update on the ship and the crew members. It was entirely appropriate, and it was exactly what he should have been doing. Doc had repaired the Galleon, as he'd said, and Gai's injuries had been appropriately treated; he was expected to make a full recovery.

"He complains a lot," Joe said, but Marvelous didn't think Joe was exactly unhappy about that. It also didn't quite sound like Gai; he hadn't complained when Basco had broken his arm, Marvelous remembered. "It's distracting," Joe continued, and Marvelous understood. Gai was keeping everyone's spirits up, giving them something to focus on, even if that focus was attempting to strangle him for not keeping quiet.

Joe continued down the list of the crew, his voice reassuring in its familiarity. He stopped talking after a while, and was quiet for long enough that Marvelous thought he'd left when he started again, quiet and not quite hesitant.

"I thought," he said, and then paused again. "I thought I was rescuing Sid," he said, almost too softly to hear. "There was an older version of the virtual training rig the G.U.P. is developing to train recruits and keep their officers sharp, and I thought Sid was in it." He laughed bitterly. "I should have known, I should have looked more closely, but I rushed in without thinking. I thought I was pulling him out of the system, but I just got stuck in it."

Joe wouldn't have said anything if he thought for a second that Marvelous could hear it, he thought distantly. The rest of his fractured consciousness was listening to his friend and lover and crew member.

"The system – I introduced him to the crew," Joe said. "To you. But the worst part." His voice sank to a whisper. "When Doc pulled me out of it, I wanted to go back in. I knew it wasn't real and I wanted to go back in, because I had you, and I had Sid, and I had the rest of the crew, and I didn't want to give up any of it."

Marvelous heard something sliding along the floor and the sound of footsteps going back and forth before Joe came back and started rearranging the blankets. Marvelous' hand was almost freed by the ensuing disarray, and he tried to reach out toward Joe. All that happened was his hand falling off the side of the bed. Joe stilled for a few seconds, and Marvelous felt his warm grip. He held on when Joe tried to let go, and the action flipped some sort of switch in his brain. Marvelous opened his eyes to see Joe staring down at him.

"Marvelous?" Joe said, his control shaken enough that Marvelous could read the raw hope on his face.

"Stop watching me sleep," Marvelous said. "Go make me some breakfast." His eyes were closing again as he said it, but he saw Joe smile first.

The next time he woke up properly, he was deeply displeased to learn that Luka had – in the face of Marvelous being completely unresponsive and Joe having had a momentary lapse of fitness for duty that no one wanted to explain – directed the Galleon to the nearest Galactic Union Police outpost and its medical facilities. The old man Gavan – Retsu – had apparently shown up briefly in the week they'd been there, and Marvelous was unreasonably irritated both that the man had shown up as if to look after him and that he'd missed it entirely.

"What," Luka said, when he turned the full force of his glare on her. He was sure that she would have been less cavalier about the whole thing if he'd been dressed and standing instead of wearing pajamas and cocooned into a veritable mound of blankets. At least he was sitting up.

"Really?" he said, watching his righteous indignation slide right off her.

"That thing you pulled out of your head was some really nasty tech," she said, completely unrepentant. She dragged a chair to the bedside and straddled it backwards, resting her arms along the top. "Most people would have been dead, whether or not it was surgically removed." She had the temerity to glare at him. "Which you did not do."

"What thing?" he muttered. He had no memory of anything in his head.

"You're not avoiding it that easily," Luka said, and held up a case with a wickedly sharp metal construct inside. A long filament was curled into the bottom of the little container, and the sight of it made him queasy. "You do remember," Luka said.

"No. Not really."

"Well." Luka put it back in her pocket. "Most people who survived would have had significant brain damage. You're lucky, and you're an idiot." She forestalled his next words with a finger on his lips. "We're not on your ship, and I'll call you an idiot as I see fit."

He glared mutely at her, and her expression slid from teasing to serious. He braced himself.

"Oh, don't look at me like that," she said. "I'm just glad you woke up. Without brain damage. Probably. And with most of your memory intact." She rattled her pocket. "This was supposed to erase it entirely. And then kill you."

"That's nice," he said. "Good thing I got rid of it."

"You're hopeless," Luka said, leaning toward him for emphasis.

He pulled her closer, nearly unbalancing her entirely, and distracted her with a very skillful kiss. She steadied herself with a hand against his chest and returned the gesture with enthusiasm before cruelly moving back. He tried to follow, but she was already in position to hold him against the mattress.

"Not until you get a clean bill of health," she said, repeating the frustrating response he'd gotten from the rest of the crew with unerring precision.

Marvelous was tempted to throw a pillow at her; he was bored, and no one would let him finish recuperating on board the Galleon. Under normal circumstances, he would have just gotten up and left, but there was a concerted effort on the part of his entire crew to keep him in the G.U.P. medical bay until the staff there felt it was appropriate for him to leave. "You're all overprotective," he said, stabbing a finger toward her.

"You're not eating," she retorted.

"I'm not hungry," he said.

"And that's why we're not helping you play jailbreak." She folded her arms across her chest as if she'd won some sort of argument.

"Fine," he muttered, and started plotting.

His initial attempt at escape was both assisted and foiled by Gai's involvement; the Earthling brought him a set of clothing when asked, but then talked so long about the differences between what the G.U.P knew and what he knew about the Dekarangers – Super Sentai team number 28 – that Marvelous fell asleep listening to him before he could actually put on the clothes that would let him look like a visitor and not a patient. The stack of clothing had vanished when he finally woke up again, Gai apparently long gone, but to his relief he found it stashed in a drawer. His relief was coupled with irritation that Gai had failed to bring him shoes, but it wouldn't be the first barefoot escape attempt he'd ever made.

His second plan was much less complicated, and simply involved waiting for the right time of day.

The station didn't technically have a solar cycle, but it did have a duty cycle that roughly corresponded to a planetary day and night, and most of the lights were turned off for the shift that was considered night. It was a relatively simple matter to wait until the lights were off and there were very few people moving around the corridors to climb out of the bed, get dressed, and sneak onto the Galleon. Simple, but exhausting. Marvelous noted that this particular outpost, at least, had terrible security.

His crew, he hoped, was on board the Galleon for the night. The only one awake and immediately visible was Doc; the engineer was wrist-deep in the control console when Marvelous quietly walked down the stairs, but he turned around at the sound of footsteps.

"What are you doing?" Marvelous asked, forestalling the same question being asked of him.

"Uh, the data chip had some unexpected – I had to reboot the Galleon's control system again," Doc said. "It should be fine now, though."

Marvelous had no idea what he was talking about; no one had wanted to discuss the freighter or the events aboard it in any detail, citing simply that they could discuss it when he felt better. "Did you get anything off of it?" he asked, trying to pretend that he did.

"Just the video file," Doc said. "That doesn't look like it has anything hidden in it."

"Excellent." Marvelous sat down in his chair; he still felt shaky, and he wasn't sure he could keep standing. "Is everyone else on board?"

"We're all here," Doc said, lowering his gaze automatically to the stairway that led to everyone's quarters. For some reason, it seemed to make him nervous. "Marvelous, I'm going to wake up Joe and tell him you're back."

"No," Marvelous said sharply, realizing that Doc had probably come to the correct conclusions regarding his lack of footwear, and Doc twitched in surprise. "Set us a course out of here," Marvelous said, trying to sound less on edge. "And then show me the video file."

"Marvelous, I really think –" Doc started. Marvelous could see where he was looking this time, as if bare feet had anything to do with where someone decided to go. He crossed his legs with the dramatic flair of a man with nothing to hide.

"Now, Doc," Marvelous said, because it was his ship, and Doc was part of his crew, and he was not going to stand for this type of insubordination, and finally Doc sighed and started the process that would disconnect the Galleon from its moorings. Free of entanglements, the Galleon eased away from the G.U.P. outpost, and Marvelous felt a sense of relief at being on his ship and free to take it where he would. It fell rapidly out of sight, and he let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.

"Where do you want to go?" Doc asked, apparently deciding that he might as well cooperate completely.

"Anywhere but here," Marvelous said. He didn't pay attention as Doc put a course into the navigation system, just watched the stars outside the windows. "The video file?" he prompted after a few minutes.

"Uh," Doc said, and he hesitantly keyed in a sequence on the control console.

The screen behind it flickered, the Gokaiger symbol vanishing. A vague shape moved away from the camera, settling into a blocky chair. The red and white background took on an unpleasant shape, and Marvelous' stomach clenched. The focus shifted to the figure in the chair, familiar smirk in place under the ridiculous floppy hat he'd taken up after throwing Marvelous to the Zangyack.

"Hello, Marvey," said Basco ta Jalokia. "I was wondering if you'd find one of these."

Marvelous was dimly aware of Doc giving him a worried look and backing out of the room, but all of his conscious attention was focused squarely on the screen in front of him. He sat bolt upright, hands clenched into fists.

"You've noticed," Basco continued lazily, crossing his legs, "that the little object you found fits into your Mobilate. Honestly, though, I'm surprised you made it this far. I thought the implant would have killed you before you made it all the way down here." He sighed, and gave the camera a contemplative look.

"I suppose one of your little friends could be the one watching this, in which case they're going to have to watch you die, unless they find you already dead. That's a little black market piece of tech, meant to keep a target docile for execution." Basco smiled, wide and expansive. "Not that I think it kept you docile, Marvey. Nothing ever does. I added a little bit extra to it, especially for you. Did you like the other surprise? Sally wasn't the only one I built, you know. I kept this one's purpose simple – counteract you, and put my tech into your head."

There was something warm seeping across his palms. Marvelous didn't take his eyes off the screen.

"I want you to know that if you hadn't chosen to hijack my ship after my death, this wouldn't have happened." Basco's smile sharpened, becoming a predator's grin. "I'm devastated that you managed to kill me in the end – because I know, Marvey, that if anyone does, it's going to be you." His voice dropped low, taking on tones of intimacy he'd never gotten away with in life. Marvelous growled, low in his throat, but Basco was still talking

"But if you thought you were going to just kill me and take my ship, you're learning why it isn't going well for you. The freighter you're on? Just a little something I picked up, cargo intact. I was waiting for the right time to sell it, but this seems like a better idea. I've added a few surprises of my own – I do hope your first mate found the one I left for him." Basco sighed. "Learning his weak point wasn't easy, but all I had to do was get a name and let his own mind create the scenario inside the array."

Basco looked directly into the camera again, and it was all Marvelous could do not to put a bullet between those smug eyes. Basco had no right to look at him like that.

"The Free Joker was your downfall, Marvey. Any crew you picked up beyond your first mate – they'll run into the other traps. But the software on the Free Joker, that's for you. It's a virus, one that buried itself in your Mobirate and jumped to the Galleon. The ship that should have been mine."

"It was never yours," Marvelous snarled.

"…Navi," Basco continued, as if he hadn't heard Marvelous at all. But of course he hadn't. "When the Galleon got close enough to my little surprise, it registered a distress signal and you found the freighter. I know you, Marvey, you wouldn't pass up the chance to loot a cargo vessel like this one. Connecting to the freighter, that's when the real fun started. That's when the real virus got through the back door the first one created, spreading from the Galleon to the Mobilates and even to Navi."

Basco stood, the camera frame following him as he paced slowly across the bridge of the Free Joker.

"I wanted you isolated," he said. "You're too good a distraction for the Zangyack for me to try to disarm you while they're still around. I'm not a tempting enough target, if you're still alive and chasing the Greatest Treasure. Especially if I can just take the treasure from you. But if I'm dead, I don't care. I hope you both burn." He laid his hands on the console and leaned toward the camera.

"I cut you off from the Galleon. I'm the reason your crew can't communicate with each other, and I'm the one who trapped you on this drifting hulk of a freighter in a remote region of space that no one will approach because they think it's haunted." Basco stepped around the console, stalking toward the camera until all Marvelous could see was his face, full of righteous fury.

"I am the reason you're going to die, Marvey. Think about that, while you still can, before your brains dissolve and you die screaming."

Basco stepped back, abruptly regaining the charming smile he'd worn when he'd started talking. "Of course, if you're not my little Marvey, then you know what's going to happen to him. If you can get out of those handcuffs, you might even want to try to help him. Or you could just wait for the cargo of this ship to find you, and then you won't be helping anyone." Basco laughed, an ugly sound low in his throat. "I've left you so many ways to die. I'm looking forward to seeing all of you in hell."

The screen flickered and went dark for nearly a full minute before the Galleon's logo returned. Marvelous took in a ragged breath, and then another, uncurling his fingers with a supreme effort of will. His hands were sticky, warmth still seeping over his palms. "I survived," he said softly. "I survived, and you're still dead, you bastard." He laughed, hearing the wild edge to it and not caring. "I survived, and my crew survived, and you can't touch me ever again."

He was still laughing when Doc came back into the room, Joe right behind him, and the rest of the crew in a tight little knot after that. He choked it off as they all carefully avoided looking right at him when he could see them, worry written over their faces. He didn't quite know how to tell them there was nothing to worry about, that he'd come out on the other side and won.

It didn't matter what had happened, because all he had to do was keep moving forward.


	16. Epilogue

Marvelous slept through most of the slow trip to Doc's not-so-randomly chosen destination. By the time the familiar blue and white planet was clearly visible, he felt physically better. The awful exhaustion had mostly faded, and if his usual appetite hadn't returned, at least his teammates had stopped looking at him sideways during meal times.

The crew was what worried him when he was awake enough to pay attention. The traps aboard the freighter had caught them all by surprise, although he at least should have known better than to take it at face value and go blindly in, and he thought he could see the signs of strain in all of them. As the outline of the Earth grew closer, he tackled them one by one.

Gai was in a way the easiest; Marvelous found him up in the crow's nest, where he'd been spending a lot of time while Basco's virus had tried to drive them all to distraction with auditory feedback.

"You sure you should be climbing up here?" he asked when he reached the top of the ladder. It felt longer than usual; he hadn't gone up it since before the freighter.

Gai shrugged, a bit of stiffness in his movements. "As long as I don't fall off or move funny, I'm okay." He gave Marvelous a once-over, his expression a little too speculative for Marvelous' liking. "What about you?"

"I'm fine." Marvelous waved a dismissive hand. Gai's face took on a distinct cast of skepticism, which Marvelous generously chose to ignore. "You were good," he said, after a moment.

"What?" Gai blinked at him, not following the non sequitur.

"On the freighter," Marvelous clarified. "You handled it well."

The grin that split Gai's face was worth the climb up the mast, even if it only lasted a few seconds before Gai was right back to asking him if he was doing okay. Marvelous glared him into silence, which didn't last more than a few seconds before a slightly less bright version of the smile returned and Gai started in on an enthusiastic recitation of who and what he wanted to visit once they'd broken atmosphere.

Marvelous listened, not committing either himself or anyone else to Gai's numerous and ambitious plans, and when Gai finally wound down, Marvelous stood next to him with a hand on his shoulder. Gai leaned into it, a little, and Marvelous couldn't help the smile at one crew member finally easing back into the normal routine.

"It wasn't – the worst part was not knowing where anyone else was," Gai said.

It was Marvelous turn to frown in confusion. "Hm?"

"On the freighter." Gai pulled his jacket a little more tightly closed. "Not being able to reach anyone else, that was the worst part. I knew Don and I were going to be fine, but it was not knowing if you guys weren't answering because there was something wrong with the Mobilates or because something worse had happened that was, um. Frightening."

"You're a good man, Gai," Marvelous said; he wasn't quite sure what Gai needed, but he could at least give him some sort of reassurance.

"Are you sure you're not dying or something?" Gai said suspiciously, and Marvelous retreated.

Luka was sitting on the kitchen counter, swinging her feet back and forth and watching Doc chopping vegetables. "It's not hard," Doc was saying. "You just make sure they're all the same size, more or less and – Marvelous!"

"Yo," Marvelous said, leaning on the door frame.

"Is something wrong?" Luka asked.

"No," he said. "Carry on."

Doc shot him a dubious glance, but finished whatever he was doing with his very large knife and then scraped the resulting pile into a large pan. "See how they're just below the water level?" he said.

Luka, who couldn't possibly have seen what he was doing from where she was, nodded. "And then you just leave them in there?"

"Well, you can't ignore it entirely," Doc said. "But it takes a few hours before it's ready for the next step." He picked up the tools he'd been using and took them over to the sink. "Just check on it every once in a while until then."

"He's explaining the magic," Luka said conversationally, and it took Marvelous a moment to figure out she was talking to him.

"It's not magic," Doc said. "It's applied chemistry."

"That's what he says," Luka said. "I'm not convinced."

Doc shook his head, the very picture of long-suffering patience. "I keep telling her, and Gai. It's not difficult."

"You can both call it whatever you want, as long as the same results keep happening," Marvelous said. He'd never managed to master more than the basics; as far as he was concerned, Luka had the right attitude.

"You hungry?" Doc asked, switching from tolerant to hopeful. "I can –"

"No, it's fine. I'm just…" He was just trying to check on his crew, after a difficult mission, but Doc and Luka seemed to be doing fine. "It's fine."

"Oh." The disappointment was almost palpable, and Marvelous ducked out of the kitchen with the distinct feeling that he'd managed to somehow make things worse.

Luka caught up with him before he'd gone more than a couple steps and followed him up to the deck. "So what are we doing on Earth?" she asked after a moment of leaning against the railing.

Marvelous shrugged. "Doc picked it, and it seemed like a good idea." He looked over at her. "Something in particular you want to do?"

It was Luka's turn to shrug. "There's always something," she said, with a gleam in her eye that meant she was planning something that was definitely going to cause some sort of trouble.

"Don't have fun without me," he said.

The gleam faded, and Luka turned to face him. "About the freighter," she began.

"You outdid yourself," he interrupted. "You kept your head, and you found a copy of the memory chip." He had intended to say _the memory chip that Basco left_ , but the second half of the phrase stuck in his throat. He coughed to clear it.

"That's not what I meant," Luka said, but she said it quietly enough that he wasn't sure whether or not he was supposed to hear. He elected to ignore it, looking out instead at the field of stars that had become familiar while they'd spent nearly a year and a half on Earth, and Luka didn't say anything else. Eventually, she went back below the deck. Marvelous stayed topside, watching the stars fade into Earth's atmosphere as the Galleon descended.

Doc had anchored the ship well outside Tokyo; Marvelous remembered that part of Gai's chatter about what he wanted to do involved his family having moved yet again. This time they were in the far southern part of the country, and the Galleon was anchored just offshore. Marvelous was reminded of the last time the Galleon had been over an ocean, when it had been all but blown to pieces on the Zangyack homeworld, but this was different. This was Earth, where – to be fair – the Galleon had been severely damaged but where they'd had their greatest success against the Zangyack.

Ahim found him up in the crow's nest after Gai had come down, running off to make whatever preparations he needed to make. The climb had seemed shorter the second time around, more like the usual easy jaunt upwards, and he breathed in the unique scent of Earth's salty ocean air.

"Marvelous," she said from behind him. He'd heard the trapdoor open and close, but he hadn't known who it was until she spoke.

"Ahim." He graced her with a gentleman's smile.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?" she said, leaning on the railing next to him.

He didn't answer in so many words. It struck him that he hadn't seen much of Ahim since the freighter; she'd been quiet, and hadn't spent much time with the rest of the crew that he'd seen.

"My parents considered using troops like those aboard the freighter to repel the imminent Zangyack invasion," Ahim said, still facing the rolling waves. The setting sun colored the sky a brilliant orange, backlighting Ahim and casting the side of her face nearest to him in shadow. "Our constitution didn't allow for it, and we would have had to spend money we didn't have, but that's not why they chose not to go down that road."

Marvelous kept his hands relaxed on the railing, and stared out at the ocean.

"They felt that the use of such technology would have had too high a moral cost." There was something in Ahim's voice he couldn't identify. "I don't know if it would have made a difference, in the end, but for a long time, I felt that they valued our people's principles over their lives. It took me some time to forgive that."

"I don't –" Marvelous started.

"When I came to you," she continued, talking right over him, "I wanted to show my people that there was another way, and that my family hadn't let them down." She moved closer to him, tucking herself against his side. Her warmth was welcome in the cool evening air, and he put an arm around her. "But what took more time was realizing what I could and could not hold them responsible for. The Zangyack weren't my family's fault, and they made what they thought was the best decision under the circumstances."

"Do you want to go home?" Marvelous asked. The Zangyack Empire had been the end of the monarchy as it was, on Ahim's homeworld. She was still nominally the planetary leader, but in the months after the Empire had broken, she had helped direct a coalition to do the actual work of governing the recovering population. "Go home and make sure your people are in good shape?"

"What?" Ahim looked up at him, frowning as if he'd missed something obvious. "The coalition is doing an excellent job," she said. "I've been in regular contact with them. I don't need to be there, or at least not right now."

"When you need to go, just tell me," he said, but he couldn't help holding her a little more closely. He wasn't going to stop her from leaving, if and when she decided that was the best course of action for her, but he would miss her while she was gone.

"Marvelous," Ahim said, and she had the same long-suffering tone Doc had had when trying to explain his applied chemistry theory to Luka yet again. She twisted around in his arms and pulled him into a gentle kiss.

"What was that for?" he asked. Ahim was usually reserved outside the bedroom, except with Luka.

"I'm not leaving," she said, and leaned against him.

Eventually Luka called up to the crow's nest, and Ahim vanished back down the trapdoor, leaving him alone under the stars. They were brighter here than they'd ever been while the Galleon had been moored near Tokyo, the sky darker. The earth below them was darker, too, fewer lights shining as the twilight deepened.

The evening air had grown bitterly cold by the time Marvelous left the crow's nest and returned inside the Galleon, and he'd waved to four of his crew as they'd left the ship to do whatever it was they wanted to do while on Earth. The common room was empty when he wandered into it, but Doc had left a covered tray with Marvelous' name on it in the kitchen.

The bridge was empty as well, and Marvelous kept walking through the Galleon's innards. It was all in order, each system he saw working properly, and completely devoid of anyone else. The sudden memory of walking alone through the Galleon after Basco and AkaRed drove him back up to the common room, but none of the others had returned. Navi was perched on the control console, quiet, but Navi wasn't the type of company he wanted.

Marvelous went up to the deck again, tired but too restless to sit still.

The cold air without his jacket drove him toward the door below decks again, but just as he reached it, Marvelous saw movement out of the corner of his eye. He fell into a defensive position, Gokai Sabre in his hand as naturally as breathing. Joe stepped out of the shadows, looking from Marvelous to the Sabre and then back again.

"Joe," Marvelous said, swinging the Sabre over his shoulder. He hadn't actually seen Joe leave, if he thought about it.

"Marvelous." Joe held the door open. Marvelous walked through it, swinging the Sabre down and dismissing it, as though that had been his plan all along. Joe followed him in silence all the way down to the kitchen, watching quietly as Marvelous went through the unfamiliar motions of making tea. He accepted the cup Marvelous handed him just as silently. Marvelous didn't know what Joe was waiting for, and it was starting to put him on edge.

The teacup went on the table with an audible click, and Marvelous threw himself into a chair with something less than his usual grace. Joe sat down, every movement even and controlled, and Marvelous wanted to throw something at him just to see him react.

"The freighter –" Joe began.

"I'm sorry for what Basco did to you," Marvelous interrupted. "That was on me."

Joe stared at him for a moment, mouth hanging slightly open. "I've made my peace with my memories of Sid," he said. "I did what I could to save him a long time ago."

"I heard you," Marvelous said. "When I was… when we were on board the station. When you said you wanted to stay in the simulation."

"Ah." Joe settled back. "You heard that."

"I told you, when you joined my crew, that I would keep you safe." Marvelous kept his hands wrapped around the teacup, drawing in its heat. "I haven't done that very well."

"You also told me we were chasing the greatest treasure in the universe, and put us in direct conflict with a galactic evil empire," Joe pointed out, sounding entirely too reasonable for Marvelous' taste. "Safe is relative." He smiled, taking the sting out of the words. "I knew what I was signing up for."

"You weren't supposed to get hurt because of me." He meant it for of his crew, but he meant it the most for Joe, who'd been with him the longest. Joe, who'd been the first person he really trusted after Basco.

"You didn't hurt me," Joe said. "Nothing that happened on board that freighter was your fault."

Marvelous dropped his eyes to the cooling tea. It was too dark, bitter to the taste, but he took a sip anyway. "Basco –" he started.

"You are not responsible for what he did." Joe had gotten closer without Marvelous noticing, staring at him now from just a few centimeters away. "If it had been someone from Luka's past, or Ahim's, or Doc's, would you blame them?"

"Of course not," Marvelous said, but that wasn't the point. They were his crew and his responsibility.

"It's no different for you, captain or not," Joe said, cutting off that argument before Marvelous could make it.

"You said you wanted to stay," Marvelous said again.

Joe gave him an inscrutable look. "You weren't supposed to hear that," he said.

"You shouldn't have said it, then," Marvelous retorted.

"You are beyond frustrating," Joe muttered, taking a sip of his own tea for the first time. "And you make terrible tea."

"No one is forcing you," Marvelous said.

Joe deliberately took another sip of the tea, and then another, until the cup was empty. He flipped it over and set it down on the saucer, watching Marvelous the entire time.

"Fine, fine, I get it." Marvelous picked up his own tea and then set it back down. "You're here because you want to be here." A knot that he hadn't consciously felt loosened, and the next breath was easier to take for it. "You're all here because you want to be here."

Joe picked up both cups, vanishing into the kitchen. He came back with the tray Doc had left, uncovered and giving off the smell of something delicious. Marvelous' stomach growled audibly, telling him for the first time since they'd answered the distress signal to begin with that he'd neglected it terribly and demanding he rectify the situation immediately. Joe, for his part, had the temerity to sit there being amused, right up until Marvelous cleaned out the last dish.

"Better?" he asked.

"When did you get so cheeky?"

That had evidently been the right thing to say; Joe laughed, the first genuine smile Marvelous had seen from him in weeks, and Marvelous grinned back. It finally felt right.

There was one more thing Marvelous wanted to do; he found Doc the following afternoon and demanded the key Basco had left for them to find.

"It's full of –" Doc said.

"I don't care. Just give it to me." Marvelous held out a hand impatiently.

"I don't have it on me," Doc muttered, but he went to get it with very little nonverbal prompting. "Here," he said, dropping the offending piece of circuitry into Marvelous' palm. "It's not the only one, though, Luka has two more."

"Seriously," Marvelous said, and went looking for Luka. She was in the middle of a sprawling shopping district a significant distance from the Galleon, and was not pleased at either the prospect of returning immediately or of Marvelous going through her quarters to find something she didn't know exactly where she'd stored, and he wasn't going to be unreasonable.

The mood was inadvertently lightened by Gai bounding on board, his wide grin barely displaced at all by the wince when he bounced off a door frame in his rush to show whoever was there the information he'd gathered on the current Super Sentai team. The uniforms were familiar, from a brief meeting months ago, not that Marvelous had a chance to get a word in edgewise.

Gai was going to fill up his scrapbook at this rate, which probably meant he'd just start another one. Marvelous kept his mouth shut voluntarily, sneaking away as soon as Gai wasn't actually looking at him.

"You're looking well," Ahim said, when Marvelous emerged on the deck with the intent of leaving the ship entirely. He had the dire suspicion that Gai's enthusiasm would chase him across the Galleon, no matter where on it he went.

"Never better," he said, with a grin. She smiled back, eyes sparkling in the sun. "Ahim," he said. "If you need to visit your people, we can do that."

"Marvelous," she said. "Have you ever participated in politics?"

He shook his head.

"Then believe me when I say I prefer to interact with them from a distance as much as possible." By the end of the sentence, she looked fierce enough to take on a platoon of Gormin singlehandedly, and then it collapsed into a rueful smile. "Although the Galleon may be developing a bit of a reputation for technological unreliability."

Marvelous laughed out loud, the sound startling him for a second. "Don't tell Doc," he said. "I don't think he'd be as impressed with your audacity as I am."

"It's our secret," Ahim said.

Gai emerged from below decks before Marvelous could either answer Ahim or escape, eyes lighting up at finding multiple crew members. "There you are!"

As he was dragged back downstairs, Marvelous wondered how Joe had managed to avoid the flood of enthusiasm. Probably with a locked door, he reflected, although Joe's fitness equipment had made its way back out into the common room while Marvelous had slept. Doc had managed to abscond as well, he noticed.

By the time Luka returned to the Galleon, Marvelous knew far more than he'd ever wanted or needed to know about the 37th Super Sentai team. Doc having been caught up in the tide of information was scant comfort, particularly since Joe managed to conveniently appear just as Gai wound down. The upside, Marvelous thought, was that at least Gai was getting better at noticing people around him trying to be sneaky. It could only help in a fight, he thought, but it would have been nice if Doc had developed his skill on someone else. Luka, for example, who had caught even less of Gai's presentation than Joe.

"You wanted these," Luka said, holding her hand outstretched with the two keys.

Marvelous swiped them, pulling the third out of his pocket along with the hammer he'd picked up earlier and never gotten around to putting away. He put down in a small pile and prepared to smash them into bits of junk.

"Not on the table!" Doc said, waving his arms, and Marvelous had to wait until Doc pulled out a battered cutting board that was apparently more suitable for smashing things against than the furniture in the common room.

The keys sparked as he brought the hammer down, breaking into smaller and smaller pieces until there was nothing left but a pile of glittering dust and scrap, but it wasn't quite enough.

"Can we set it on fire?" he asked.

Scrap metal burned less well than he'd assumed, given all of the things he'd seen the Zangyack light up over the course of his not insignificant career fighting with them, but Marvelous was nothing if not determined. His single concession was not trying to light a fire on the Galleon; Gai directed him toward a suitable location on the ground, and both fuel and accelerants turned up accordingly. Doc surprised him by lugging what looked like a cooler off the Galleon's deck.

"We might as well make a party out of it," Luka said, showing up just behind Doc with another full box. Marvelous' first instinct was to tell his crew that destroying the physical remnants of the last thing Basco had ever done to him was not an occasion for a party. His second thought was that nothing would have pissed Basco off more than knowing that Marvelous had not only survived his trap but was using it to fuel a celebration, and he grinned fiercely at her.

"Carry on," he said. He set about constructing the fire to burn hot and fast; celebration or not, nothing else was to be done until the last remnants of the virus-ridden chips were nothing more than melted scrap and ash. The others set up around him, the sounds a pleasant anchor in the back of his awareness until his crew stood waiting. When he was ready, he struck a match and dropped it on the pyre.

It blazed up more quickly than he'd hoped, and he snatched his hand back. The pile of scrap had been collected in a twist of paper, and he threw it into the center of the conflagration. For a few seconds, he saw Basco's face, twisting into the monster he'd been underneath, before the image dissolved. The flames turned crimson, when the scrap caught, shimmering into poisonous yellow and bilious green before the brilliant color burned itself out and faded into an unassuming orange.

Marvelous had no positive memories associated with fire, and even the flickering orange and yellow of normally burning wood brought up a host of unwanted thoughts. It smelled different, though, the scent of burning organic fuel the only thing that remained after the accelerants had burned off, instead of plastic and metal and dust and broken lines. He shivered, despite the heat, and then consciously put the thoughts away. They had no further place with him.

A heavy arm draped across his shoulders, and Marvelous leaned against Joe's broad chest. Joe wasn't looking at him, was staring into the fire as though he wasn't paying attention to anything else, and Marvelous smiled at him for it as the flames started to die down. The scar on his foot twinged, reminding him that it was there, and he rotated it absently. Basco might have played a crucial part in his past, but he didn't get to dictate what Marvelous did in the future, not ever again.

"Well?" Gai asked, and Marvelous looked up to see the rest of his crew expectant and hopeful.

"Go ahead," he said, and he was almost willing to bet he'd never seen any of them move quite so fast.

The rest of the evening went more or less smoothly, for all that Gai insisted that a former Sentai team needed to maintain appropriate public decorum and would therefore be observing complete sobriety while on Earth. Marvelous stayed more or less on the sidelines, encouraging his crew in whatever half-baked idea they had at any given moment enough that no one looked at him sideways, but unable to completely stay in the moment.

"So what's next?" Joe asked, much, much later, while Gai was challenging Luka to some ridiculous feat of physicality that she was going to win without so much as breaking a sweat.

Marvelous shrugged. "I hear there's a pro-Zangyack group roaming around Tenkao," he said. "Might be something there worth taking a look at."

"You're just saying that because they produce heavy industrial machinery, and you think we can get new toys for the Galleon," Joe said.

"Heavy industrial machinery that they use for mining," Marvelous pointed out. "All those asteroids."

"Asteroids are terrible for target practice." Joe shook his head. "Besides, if you're looking for Zangyack, Handore."

"Handore?" Marvelous sat up straighter without meaning to; Handore had been known for its obscenely wealthy upper class, and had toppled with barely a fight when the Zangyack had gotten hold of it. "Handore."

"Should I consider the course laid in?" Joe asked, entirely too amused to be making such a straight face. Marvelous eyed him suspiciously.

"Handore," he said. "Then Tenkao."

"Aye, aye, Captain." Joe gave him a mock salute, and Marvelous swatted him in retaliation.

Joe gave as good as he got, which led to the rest of the crew joining in. Marvelous wasn't sure who was on whose side at any given moment, or who it was that threw who into the moonlit ocean first, but the entire thing culminated with all of them getting soaked from head to toe. Freezing and laughing, they crowded around the now-dying fire.

"Do you yield?" Marvelous asked Joe, despite the two of them having been back to back for the majority of the mock battle.

"Never," Joe said, which was exactly the answer Marvelous had been hoping for.

"Good," he said. "Can't have that."

"Hn." Joe might have smiled, but no one else had any such reservations. They were cold, and wet, and covered in sand, and they were his crew.

"I'm only going to say this once," he said, knowing without directly looking at any of them that he had everyone's undivided attention. "If anyone needs to leave, for any reason, I'm not going to stop you." Someone tried to interrupt, but he kept speaking as though he hadn't heard. "You all joined me to search for the greatest treasure in the universe. We found it. You didn't have to stay, but you did, when we broke the Zangyack homeworld. You're all welcome to stay, but I want you to know there's no obligation." The words ran out, and he let them stop.

Doc was the first one to break the following silence. "Did I hear you say we're going towards Handore tomorrow?" he asked.

Gai's eyes widened. "That's one of the planets catalogued by –" he started.

"Nowhere near Famille," Ahim said over whatever part of Super Sentai history Gai was trying to tell them about now. "A tragedy." Her face and voice said she wasn't disappointed at all. "Although I suppose I will have to visit eventually."

"Tenkao's after Handore," Doc said. "That's not too far away."

"Ah." Ahim sighed. "Marvelous, would it be possible to plan a visit to Famille after our business on Tenkao has concluded?"

Marvelous stared at her.

"Of course none of us are going anywhere," Luka said. "Although if we're visiting friends and family, can we drop by Cain's?" She paused. "Ahim, he could use some administrative help."

"I'm happy to recommend any one of a number of individuals," Ahim said. "In fact, we could provide transportation from Famille to – where did Cain establish his facility?"

"Facility? That's a whole _planet_ ," Doc said, and the three of them started arguing over the correct choice of word to describe the project Cain had started, with Gai on the edges wanting more details about all of it.

"Looks like you're not getting rid of anyone," Joe said.

"I don't want anyone to feel trapped. I won't do that to anyone." The breeze picked up, and Marvelous shivered.

"If you're not careful, they're going to think you don't want them around." Joe wrapped his arms around Marvelous from behind, since no one was currently paying attention to either of them.

"Just them?" Marvelous asked.

Joe didn't answer, just stood without moving.

"Compelling argument," Marvelous murmured, and then it registered that Ahim had volunteered his ship for transport duty without authorization – clearly a situation that had to be rectified. Joe stayed close as Marvelous broke into the discussion, not to refuse use of the Galleon but to determine transit fees. They had a reputation to maintain, after all. Pirates took what they wanted. And if they managed to create a crew and a family along the way, one that could weather whatever foes living or dead could throw at them, there was nothing wrong with that.

END


End file.
